


Harry Potter and the Peanut Gallery

by shadowscribe



Series: Look At My Life [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Animal Sacrifice, Blood Magic, Character building, Dark Magic, Harry living his own life, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Manipulative Albus Dumbledore, Master of Death Harry Potter, Moral Ambiguity, Neutral Harry, Paganism, Slytherin Harry Potter, Time Travel, Worldbuilding, a million sides to the same story, do not copy to another site
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-01-21 01:26:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 54,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21291353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowscribe/pseuds/shadowscribe
Summary: Alternative (non-Harry) POV drabbles and/or longer chapters to accompany the main fic "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show"
Series: Look At My Life [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1534850
Comments: 1262
Kudos: 5421





	1. Wait and See (Dumbledore)

**Author's Note:**

> Exactly what it says on the tin.
> 
> I decided almost immediately that I wanted "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show" to be told exclusively from Harry's POV but let's be honest, we all want to a) know what everyone else thinks of what is happening and b) know that so much of the story can/does happen outside of Harry's line of sight. So here we are. Literally any character (and quite possibly even some random, made-up OC) might show up here but expect to see a lot of Dumbledore, Snape, Draco, Hermione, and Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort. 
> 
> If there are particular scenes/prompts/ POVs that you really want to see let me know!
> 
> Standard disclaimers/reminders: I don't own Harry Potter. I am not making any money off of this. Do not post my works elsewhere. I only post my fanfiction on AO3. If you see it elsewhere it is there without my permission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be read after Ch. 6 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show"

The Sorting Hat is mocking him.

Albus sits in the cushioned throne behind his desk and stares upwards at the tattered hat sitting serenely on a shelf. It won’t give up any of its secrets, any of what it saw inside the students’ heads. He learned that long ago – a security feature installed by one of the Founders. In his less than charitable moments he has laid the blame at Salazar Slytherin’s feet but when his head is clear of emotions that might confound him in the moment, he can admit that it had probably been Helga’s work. To keep everything _fair_.

He sighs and taps at the list in front of him. It is the notes of this evening’s sorting: a recording of every incoming student and their Hat assigned house. He will file a copy with the school records and send another along to the Prophet for them to include in their morning edition. _That_, he knows, is going to cause an unfortunate stir.

It already is.

Perhaps, he reflects, he should have taken more of an active part in Harry’s upbringing.

He likes to tell himself that he wanted the boy to have a normal childhood, to grow up without the fawning adoration of the Wizarding World surrounding him at every turn. And it _is _true. A child brought up in the spotlight, receiving adulation and adoration at every quarter would have made for a poor foil to Tom. It would have been a terrible blow for all of them if the child of prophecy had grown up under the universal misassumption that Tom had already been vanquished for good.

He had hoped, of course, just like everyone but a day spent looking over the child had disabused him of that hope. That Tom had vanished had been indisputable but so also was the fact that there exists some kind of bond between Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. A _link_. What type of link, Albus is still not quite sure but he does know that no matter what it turns out to be _it is not possible to be linked to a dead man_.

He had considered, very briefly, killing the child himself and destroying the connection between them but to kill an infant, even for a good cause, is a terrible thing. It also would be hasty and irresponsible. After all, while Harry might possess a link to Tom it is unlikely that the link is the sole thing keeping Tom from passing on. No, he had decided, it is better to wait and see.

So, yes, he perhaps had possessed _qualms_ about leaving Harry on the doorstep of Number Four Privet Drive and in the care of Petunia Dursley but in the end it had been his only choice. Sirius had turned out to be a Death Eater, succumbing, perhaps inevitably, to the wishes of the family he had once eschewed so fiercely. Remus was a good boy, but a werewolf and not a fit guardian for “The Boy Who Lived”. The Longbottoms were as good as dead and if Harry had been placed with them he _would_ be dead, so Albus counts it a blessing that he had refrained from taking the boy to his godmother.

There are others, of course, that could have taken the boy. Half of the wizarding world would have opened their homes at the slightest hint that such a thing were needed and _that_ is the problem. Because Albus is not naïve enough to think that every applicant would have been well intentioned. Indeed, gaining custody of the boy who defeated Voldemort seems like a frankly easy way to do away with a rival or to culture him into something that would be just as terrible as Tom. By simple legalities, Andromeda Tonks and Narcissa Malfoy have equal right to guardianship of the boy but the Malfoys have – as much as it galls him to admit – a great deal more wealth and influence to spend on gaining legal control over Harry Potter.

So, really, it had been the best for everyone involved that Harry go to the Dursleys.

Not the happiest of results for Harry, given what Arabella has told him over the years, but a great deal better than being raised by the likes of Lucius Malfoy. Or dying in a tragic accident and not being raised at all.

And if the lack of warmth from his aunt and uncle made Harry latch more tightly to those that showed him kindness, to the world that he would need to protect… well, Albus will make use of whatever weapons he can in this war, gods forgive him.

Though, when Harry’s first letter had been delivered – and replied to! – without any issue Albus had rather decided that Arabella was being over sensitive and that obviously the Dursleys had turned out to be slightly better caretakers than he had given them credit for. It had meant that he hadn’t needed to send in Hagrid, which had been both a loss and a relief. A loss because the boisterous man would have made it quite clear to Harry that Tom likely still alive and that there are definitely people that should be avoided but a relief because it got the Stone he is borrowing from Nicholas out of Gringotts before someone could get wind of it.

He wonders now if Hagrid’s presence would have made a difference. He wonders if the big-hearted half-giant’s words would have made a difference, would have nudged Harry into following his parents’ footsteps or if the stain of Lord Voldemort is too dark for Harry to overcome. For the sake of them all, he hopes this is not so. He had hoped that Harry would form a bond with the Weasley’s youngest boy. He had asked Molly to enter from muggle London just so that Harry would have the chance to meet someone his own age before the chaos of Hogwarts struck but from what Minerva had said the two boys seemed off to a rocky start and instead Harry is left with a less favorable companion in Draco Malfoy.

He’s sure there is nothing inherently wrong with the boy. He is, after all, a child and children very, very rarely have the capacity to be evil all on their own. Even Tom might have had a chance at… well, probably not at turning out good – it had been clear from the start that the boy was cold and rotten to the core – but if things had turned out differently he might have at least turned out to be a benign tumor instead of a malignant cancer upon wizarding society.

Albus sighs.

Like in so many other things this evening had not gone as expected and, as before, he is left with no other option but to wait and see.

At least Severus will be able to keep a close eye on the boy.

Perhaps, if they are lucky, they can nip any questionable behavior in the bud before it sets the Boy Who Lived on a path that will spell a dark ending for the wizarding world.


	2. Letters Home (Draco)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be read after Ch. 8 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show"

_1 September 1991_

_Dear Father and Mother,_

_Uncle Severus assures me that he will see that this is delivered to you tonight so that I might tell you the news myself. As expected, I was sorted into Slytherin. So were Vincent and Greg, Pansy, Daphne, Blaise, Theo, and Harry Potter. That was a surprise! He thought it odd that everyone expected him to be in Gryffindor. He told Blaise that he didn’t understand why people expected him to be his parents when he didn’t remember them and knew nothing about them. And I mean nothing. He says that he didn’t even know what they looked like until he saw a picture of them in a book! I met him on the train and had an enjoyable ride with him and several others. They are not quite our usual crowd but they were all purebloods or half-bloods at least. _

_I am well and am excited for classes to start tomorrow. I promise that I will take my studies seriously and that I will write you at the end of the week._

_All my love,_

_Your son, Draco._

_P.S – You will never believe this! Harry Potter is a parselmouth! He has a snake and everything! He apparently didn’t even realize that speaking to snakes was special. He thought all wizards could do it and didn’t even realize that he was speaking in another language until we told him!_

* * *

_6 September 1991_

_Dear Father and Mother,_

_My first week at Hogwarts has gone well. The classes are easy at this point, though I expect them to get harder. Potions is obviously my favorite but I am enjoying the rest of the classes as well. Well, except for History of Magic. That ghost Binns is a terrible bore! I am looking forward to the first official flying lesson next week, even if the actual lesson will be boring. I miss flying._

_Vincent and Greg have settled in. I am ensuring that they get their homework completed and Uncle Severus has arranged private tutoring for them every Sunday. They are a little overenthusiastic in following me around but there’s not much else for them to do so I let them._

_I think I can officially count Harry Potter as a friend. Pansy is mad but <strike>Harry is more fun than Pansy anyway</strike> Father says I should make sure to cultivate many friends and allies. To that end, I continue to speak with those that I shared the train ride with: Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom, Hannah Abbot, Susan Bones, and Mandy Brocklehurst. Longbottom and I are the only purebloods but the rest are all half-bloods from respectable families so I feel that I am not bringing disgrace to the Malfoy name. _

_I am hesitant to bring it up but I think something is wrong with Harry. He has his physical with Uncle Severus tonight so hopefully he gets healed but he doesn’t eat much and is prone to fits of dizziness and headaches. He even collapsed during our first Astronomy lesson! <strike>I am worried.</strike> He is nothing like I expected him to be! He is quiet and spends most of his time reading or talking to his snake. He seems really powerful. We were learning about the _lumos_ spell in Charms this week and he not only got it on his first try but it was so bright I was still seeing dots after class! He says he never had tutors but surely he must have?_

_Anyway, I hope you both are doing well. How are things going at the Ministry? Did Cerys foal yet? Have the new variety of roses bloomed yet? <strike>I miss you.</strike> Please tell me all about your weeks. We are done with lessons for the week and have worked on our homework so now Blaise and I are going to teach Harry how to play gobstones. He’s never played!_

_All my love,_

_Your son, Draco_


	3. When a Good Man Goes to War (Snape)

_Is there something wrong with being in Slytherin?_

The quiet, innocent question has haunted Severus all week, dogging his steps with all the persistence of pissed off Mrs. Norris. It had hit him square in the chest, knocking all the air from his lungs and leaving him gaping and gasping like a bloody imbecile in front of the boy. He has never been so off kilter in his entire life. Such a simple, little thing to disarm him but for a moment his defenses had been utterly obliterated, leaving him raw and aching.

He had been so sure… _so sure_…

And that is his bloody problem, isn’t it? All his fucking life he is so sure, so bloody certain, right up to the moment that he is not only proven wrong but slapped in the fucking face with it.

“Fuck. _Fuck!_” he screams and hurls his drink at the dungeon wall, the heavy glass shattering into thousands of tiny shards that rain down upon the floor like snow. Gasping, he curls in on himself as if wounded, as if it were he that shattered and not a cheap piece of glass, fingers clutching desperately at the back of his couch as he lets his emotions run free for just a minute. Releasing them in a short, sharp burst so that his mind does not explode beneath the weight of holding them back. “Fuck,” he whispers again and is horrified to hear his voice crack.

Severus does not cry often.

He had learned early in life that tears only brought more pain. His years at Hogwarts had only cemented the lesson that Tobias had taught him.

Since he learned the lesson of silence at four, he has only sobbed once in his life - cried until his body shook from exhaustion and he was so dehydrated that the tears simply stopped coming. There has only been once that he had screamed until his vocal chords were shredded, until every muscle in his chest and face hurt for days after he had finally fallen silent.

It has been years since he has allowed himself anything more than that terrible prickling in the corners of his eyes but tonight he can feel the warmth of tears slipping down his cheeks as he stares at the rolls of parchment sitting on his coffee table. Such an innocuous thing to break his control. Just two rolls.

But that is not true, now is it?

His control began breaking before today.

It began breaking when Lily’s child asked “_Is there something wrong with being in Slytherin?”_.

No.

It began when _Potter’s_ child asked, “_Is there something wrong with being in Slytherin?”._

His control has been cracking all week. Hairline fractures that spiral and spread every time he has observed the cautious, quiet boy – the boy who does so _well _in his classes but rarely instigates participation. The boy who walks through the castle as if he has a map of all its secrets in his head but jumps at shadows and touch, who keeps his back to the walls and the corners of the rooms - until a decade’s worth of expectations, of _knowledge, _is crumbling away in great swaths, leaving him raw and bleeding underneath.

And now this.

All of the control he has prided himself on, the cold, unfeeling mask that he has cultivated since before he could read is all but gone. He is dangling by thin, gossamer threads and if they snap it is quite likely that he will kill someone. That he will be lost to all the rage and sorrow that bubbles beneath the surface, to the sheer helplessness that has swept over him his entire life.

Dumbledore, maybe.

‘Tuney, most certainly. She and whatever boorish, miserable beast she has married.

Himself, almost definitely, when it all has finished. When the fires of grief and anger finally burn out. When the ineffective meaninglessness of his own life finally drowns him.

It is always going to end that way.

Whatever Dumbledore’s plan is, whatever cards he holds close to his chest, Severus doubts that he will be alive at the end of it. There is no room for one such as he in whatever future the Headmaster seeks to build.

But the Dark Mark is still ash gray on his forearm, sickly and weak, its edges blurred like charcoal on a page. It still aches, bone deep and throbbing: a single beat for every hour, the pull of a heartbeat that isn’t – shouldn’t be! – there.

The Dark Mark is on his arm and the child is finally asleep in his dorm, Dreamless Sleep slipping through his veins.

Harry James Potter.

The Boy-Who-Lived.

Potter’s son.

_Lily’s_ son.

Severus takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, reaching for the icy, iron control that sits beneath the volatile waves of fury and disgust and wills it to settle back over him.

He takes a breath. And another. And another. And another. Until he feels like he is wrapped in ice. Until he feels like he has suspended himself in the chilled depths of the lake that surges against the window behind him.

He takes a breath and feels the heat of his tears against his cheeks.

He was supposed to have been safe, Potter’s son. Dumbledore had whisked him away, had _promised_…

But he knows the strength of Albus’ word, doesn’t he? Knows how worthless and weak it is.

Severus has spent ten years preparing to face Potter’s son. Ten years wasted coaxing flames against a proud, arrogant child who _does not exist_.

Instead, he is left with a slip of a boy who has the raven Potter hair and Lily’s grass green eyes and something in the shape of his too prominent cheekbones and the line of his jaw that remind Severus of Mr. Evans as he puttered around his living room, showing a shy, skittish Severus the new plant clippings he had acquired for the tank of fish he kept in the corner of the room.

Instead, he is left with a child he has promised to protect. A promise that has chafed at him like irons for years as bitterness warred with joy that something of his first friend – his _only_ friend – survived.

_Lily’s son_, who bears a decade of mistreatment upon his skin and his spirit.

_Lily’s son_, who should be dead but for the strength of the magic that thrums in his flesh.

_Lily’s son_, who sleeps in a castle beneath a trap designed to lure in the remnants of a great and terrible man who has already tried to kill him once.

_Lily’s son_, who had stared up with him feral, frantic, fear-filled eyes and begged, “_You can’t tell Dumbledore! You can’t!”_

Severus can still feel the touch of the boy’s fingers gripping the front of his robes.

“_I’m not lying_,” he had said. “_I’m not.”_

“I know,” Severus says again, his words a roll of thunder against his empty room.

He knows.

He knows.

_“Please don’t tell him_,” the boy had asked, despair and defeat so thick in his head, so heavy in his heart, that Severus had not needed to be a Master Legilimens to feel.

“I won’t.”

_I won’t. I won’t. I won’t. _

The quiet strength of his promise echoes around the room and beats in his heart until it is part of him, until it is as much of him as the blood in his veins or the magic in his core.

_"I promise you, Harry, you will never have to go back there again."_

Albus’ promises may be flash and smoke, dissipated and broken by a glancing touch but Severus knows the strength of his own promises. They are a mountain against crashing waves, a supple, deeply rooted sapling against howling winds. He bends, but he does not break. He stands, unmoving, and does not fall.

Even through the ice and cold of his tattered, slowly-regained control the sight of the rolls of parchment on the coffee table make his fingers itch for his wand. Not the familiar length of English Oak that had once been his mother’s, that he has used since she had pressed it into his hands on September 1st, 1971 on the platform at King’s Cross but the other wand that rests in the specialty sheath along the length of his spine, the grip of it resting just below the topmost knob of his spinal chord. _His wand_, the wand that had chosen him when he had stumbled into Ollivander’s shop numb and drunk on grief and pain, unable to even _look_ at the wand of his childhood, of the wand he had raised in the Dark Lord’s service.

_“Interesting_,” the wandmaker’s voice had whispered, rustling like paper at the edge of his senses. _“It is not often that I sell one of these. Blackthorn with dragon heartstring. Twelve and a half inches. Fierce. Enduring. Meant for battle_,” he had told Severus, staring into his eyes. “_Such a curious thing, isn’t it Mr. Snape? To sell a warrior’s wand only when the fighting is finally over_.”

But the fighting hadn’t been over. It isn’t over. Severus imagines that he will never see the end of it. He will be gone by then. Gone like dust on the wind, a corpse struck down fighting and clawing as he has since he first entered this miserable world.

His fingers long too touch it, to pull it from its resting place and go into battle. To bend and torment and _break_ those scramble before him.

It would not be the first time he has cast Unforgiveables with it and it almost certainly will not be the last.

But no.

Not yet.

Severus breathes and wraps himself in an icy, artificial calm.

He breathes and dashes the tears from his cheeks and summons a quill and the fine, thick parchment that he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk.

There is little doubt in his mind that someday, before the end, he will march to literal battle but first, for now, there are other ways to wage war.

He is the Head of Slytherin House. He is cunning and ambition. He is a snake, twisting and curling and insinuating. He knows when to wait and when to strike. He has played this game long before he ever came to Hogwarts. He had learned it clutching his mother’s skirts and cowering beneath Tobias’ fists.

He learned it and learned it well until it beats as surely as his promises inside his chest.

And there are many in this world that owe him favor, whether they like it or not.


	4. Disappointment (McGonagall)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after chapter 6 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show"

Minerva is sulking. There is no other word for it. She is sitting on the rug before the fire in her sitting room, all four feet pressed tightly together, sitting straight with her ears laid halfway back and her tail lashing behind her in a _whip whip whip_ across the rug.

The students have all been put to bed and as a Head of House she has no duty to roam the corridors after curfew searching out misbehaving students or other dangers. Not tonight anyway. She would have welcomed it tonight. Welcomed the distraction.

Instead she is here.

Sulking.

_Ach_.

Her tail gives a particularly hard _snap_ and if she had been in human form her lips would have probably disappeared entirely given how hard she is pressing them together.

She has been looking forward to this day for a decade. Ten years spent wondering about that poor little bairn left on the doorstep – the _doorstep_, Albus, _really_! – for those awful muggles to find. Ten years spent hoping that they had treated him well, that despite all the evidence to the contrary that they had done right by their flesh and blood and that little Harry Potter had grown up happy – there certainly hadn’t been any issue getting the child his letter, even if Albus wouldn’t let her deliver it herself. Ten years spent waiting for the moment when she could pop the Sorting Hat onto his head and hear it shout “_Gryffindor!”._

Except it hadn’t.

The stupid, _bloody _thing hadn’t.

Instead, after a terrible long deliberation – they haven’t had a hat stall that long in _years_ – the familiar enchanted voice had called out “_Slytherin!” _and Minerva had felt her heart stop in her chest.

Slytherin.

Little Harry Potter who looks so much like both of his parents and so different all at the same time has been sorted into Slytherin.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Slytherin, _technically_, she knows. She shouldn’t misalign an entire house just because of a few bad apples. They have their place in the world, just like everyone else.

But it’s not in Gryffindor.

And Harry Potter won’t be _hers_.

Severus is not a bad man. He’s not necessarily a good one, either, she thinks. The tattoo on his arm decides that without much fuss but he’s honorable enough beneath that scathing tongue and terrifying demeaner. He’s certainly defensive enough of his students to do a mother dragon proud and if she and the other teachers didn’t keep him in check then his blatant favoritism would leave the other houses destitute – and his own _soaring_, of course – in bloody house points.

But he had _hated _James Potter.

Had hated the child’s father and spurned the child’s mother.

And now that child is stuck in his house for the next seven years.

_Ach._

Minerva’s ears are practically flat against her head at the thought.

She’ll have to keep an eye on him. Make sure he treats the child right. Make sure his prejudices don’t hurt the boy.

Harry Potter might not wear the red and gold on his uniform but in her heart, he’ll always be one of her lions.

Feeling slightly better now that she has a plan of action she gets up and stalks from the room, her tail rising straight in the air.

The evening calls for a bit of whiskey and a hot bath.

And maybe everything will make sense in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't intend to write this chapter but I literally could not get sulky-cat-McGonagall out of my head.


	5. Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe (Pomfrey)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be read after Chapter 9 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show

The hospital wing is too large and too loud in its silence once the pair of Slytherins leave in a flash of green, the massive fireplace on the wall swallowing them whole and leaving her in the white, empty space.

She won’t forget the sight of them for a long time: one tall and dark, buttoned up and swathed in so many layers that might as well be armor and the other small and slight. Too skinny and more skittish than a unicorn in a brothel, Harry Potter had been all but catatonic beneath Severus’ touch as the forbidding professor had gently led him away.

Poppy’s heart twists even tighter in her chest until it feels like a dishrag, rung out until it’s half dry with fibers straining beneath grasping fingers.

She hadn’t been expecting this. Not at all.

It’s certainly not the first time Severus has brought a student to her bearing the marks of ill treatment and it is sadly, definitely not the last but rarely has she been caught so off guard. As many years as she’s been in this job she’s seen just about everything. She’s developed a dab hand over the years of being able to pick out the trouble makers, the accident prone, the risk takers. She’s learned to recognize the signs of children who are not being treated as they should be. She’s not perfect. There are always a few surprises but largely she suspects the basics – enough to keep her from being surprised, enough to allow her to remain steady – before they ever show up in the Hospital Wing.

But she hadn’t expected Harry Potter. She hadn’t even an inkling and now she feels like someone has ripped the floor from beneath her feet.

With a flick of her wand there is no longer any evidence that Mr. Potter had even been here: broken glass vanished and tipped over furniture righted. Severus had taken the diagnostic records with him as well as the list potions the poor boy would need to be given. Normally she would have protested. A student’s records are meant to stay with her. They are hers to guard over and hers to keep so that she might treat them properly when they inevitably wind up in her care through illness, accident, or their own stupidity.

Tonight, she lets it go. Lets the only written evidence of what poor Mr. Potter has suffered vanish into one of the inner pockets of Severus’ robes. She would be an utter fool to think that she will ever see those pieces of parchment again.

Of course, given the boy’s distress, it might be a miracle that she remembers the encounter at all.

Shaped by his own experiences, Severus it terribly protective of those students in his care and Poppy does not doubt, not for a single moment, that if he thought that obliviating her was the best way to keep one his students safe that he would do it. Severus Snape is an honorable man but it is to his own code that he answers. She rather suspects that he has seen too much – _done_ too much – on both sides of the law to know that right and wrong are not always so easily distinguishable. She cannot fault him for that. Nor can she fault the quiet devotion that so few ever get to see. It is likely only the fact that she has known him since he was a small lad - scruffy and shy with too many bruises of his own when the school year began and in and out of her ward too often during his months in the castle – and cared for him during the majority of the years since as he has suffered and grown into a fine, if sharp and lonely, man that he trusts her to do as the boy asked.

To keep it secret.

It is only later - after she has dealt with a twisted ankle, a severe case of menstrual cramps, two headaches, and a third year Ravenclaw who managed to banish his own thumb plus locked down the Hospital Wing with the advent of curfew - that she allows herself to really think about the situation at all.

“Merlin,” she breathes as she sinks shakily into the chair behind the large expanse of her desk, everything hitting her at once.

Hands shaking, she fixes herself a cup of tea. Wishes for something stronger. Adds more sugar to combat the numb sort of cold creeping through her veins. Takes a sip and lets the sweet heat fall down her throat and pool in her stomach, radiating out into flesh that is suddenly, desperately chilled despite the layers of her uniform and the thick wool socks that cushion her feet.

Fact: Harry Potter, arguably the most famous child – most well-known _person _– in wizarding Britain is the victim of long-term abuse. Likely stretching all the way back to his parents’ death.

Fact: When presented with the logical step of bringing his condition to the notice of the Headmaster, arguably the most _influential _wizard in Britain and the one most likely to better the boy’s circumstances Mr. Potter had become almost feral with fear. And not just fear but rage as well. The emotions had been so great that she had felt them move around the room like an actual, physical beast.

Conjecture: Harry Potter does not trust Albus Dumbledore. He fears him.

_He left me on the doorstep with nothing but a blanket and a note._

Fact: Severus had not tried to reassure him, had not tried to convince him that it would be for the best. That the Headmaster would likely bend over backwards to help the child who ended You-Know-Who. No, instead he had looked Harry Potter in the eye and _agreed_ with him.

_I know._

Conjecture: Severus Snape does not trust Albus Dumbledore either.

And Poppy has no idea what to do about _that_.

Albus is not without fault, she knows. Prone to favoring his own house and being wary and distant to students who do not conform to his own tidily organized views of right and wrong but he ultimately sees the good in people and seeks to foster it, providing opportunity for betterment and growth. For safety.

And yet, one of the best men she knows does not trust him. And a child fears him so much that it provokes accidental magic. Wild magic. _Protective_ magic.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” she whispers as she stares into her cup, her mother’s words falling from her mouth as the have not in years. The quiet words that she had whispered as she knelt beside Poppy’s bed and prayed.

Poppy wishes for her now. Wishes for her mother’s quiet strength and bottomless faith in her Christian god. Wishes for a structure of belief that allows her to believe that there is a being out there who knows everything, sees everything, and has the situation well in hand.

Merlin, that would be marvelous.

But as far as she knows there isn’t. There is just her to pick up the pieces she has been given and try to figure out what they mean.

She fixes herself another cup of too sweet tea and drinks it in the warmth and quiet of her office. By the time she is done her hands have steadied enough that she can write without dripping ink all over the page or rendering her writing illegible.

Putting her cup aside she opens Mr. Potter’s empty file and pulls a fresh form from her desk. After filling in his name, date of birth, and basic height and weight she goes on to note that he hasn’t had any of his magical immunizations, has a poorly healed broken arm, poor eyesight, and some food sensitives. She also includes the schedule to correct the first, a copy of a prescription for Bone Strengthening Solution and a notation on basic physical therapy exercise to fix the second, and additional prescriptions for Headache Relief and Stomach Soother to handle the last two.

It’s nothing big, nothing worrisome, but it should be enough to offer explanation for anyone that might come looking – legally or not – for Harry’s occasional upcoming presence in the hospital wing, for the potions he might be seen taking, for the fact that he is going to look rather unwell in the upcoming weeks as the potions and care begin their work.

She might not have all the pieces – Merlin, she probably has so few as to be laughable – but she will do her job.

She will take care of her patients.

She will keep them safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter I had meant to write last time. I think I have one more Peanut Gallery chapter in me and then I'll be back to work on the main story (and I'm super excited for it, not going to lie). 
> 
> We don't know much about Pomfrey in canon and my muse took that as blatant permission to make up extensive backstory for her even though practically none of it will come into play (it's been one of those days). The highlights include: her mother was a devout Catholic, French muggle who fell in love with her father (an English wizard) while he was in France coordinating with both muggle and magical governments during WW1. When the war was over she returned to Britain with him where after many attempts and many losses they had Poppy. She began her attendance at Hogwarts several years behind Tom Riddle and was sorted into Ravenclaw. Her mother died during her sixth year and her quick and sudden decline (cancer) prompted Poppy's desire to be a mediwitch. She remained close to her father (an employee of the Department for International Relations at the Ministry and a former Ravenclaw himself) until his death in 1980, when he was killed by falling rubble/ stray spell fire in a stand off between Aurors and Death Eaters.


	6. Falling Apart (Quirrell/Voldemort)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ran away with me and I have zero regrets.  
Can be read after chapter 11 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show.  
Also, I feel like there should be a warning for the stupid long author's note at the end.

Everything hurts.

_[everything hurts]_

He feels it from both directions now: the too full sensation, like a balloon about to pop or a bloated carcass left out in the sun. It makes his skin itch and his bones ache. It makes his muscles spasm and his throat randomly close as if it has forgotten how to allow air into lungs. He feels it all crushing in around him – muscle, skin, and bone trapping him in place. Veins and nerves and pathways that are familiar but not the same, not _his_. It makes it impossible to settle, impossible to calm. He constantly feels like he’s going to burst, like he’s going to jump out of his own skin and dissipate like smoke on the wind.

He slips into the teachers’ lounge five minutes before the traditional end of September faculty meeting, narrowly avoiding being sandwiched between Pomona and Aurora who, despite coming from opposite directions, are already several minutes into a conversation about the newest planting of… something. Quirinus loses track of the conversation as Rolanda squeezes past him with a loud “hello” and he nearly stumbles at the…

_[hurt fraying wretched ripe putrid bursting heavy exhausted stupidbitch cold jittery wouldbesoeasytojustletgo letgoanddisappearagain driftalong]_

_[nothingnothingnothingnothing]_

Hiding the grimace of pain against the curve of his shoulder, he manages to return her brisk greeting with minimal stuttering and make it to the table without further incident.

Breathe in, two, three, four.

Breathe out, six, seven, eight.

He focuses on his breathing to quell the shaking of his limbs: the thrashing, seizing shakes that pull at his muscles and contort his bones.

He had hoped that things would settle now that they – that he and his master - had been together for several months but instead it is getting worse. The connection is stronger - his world existing through the lens of two eyes, his body slowly following the directions of two different sets of thoughts - but instead of easing the discomfort of possession the familiarity seems to be aggravating it.

He doesn’t know how long he will be able to hold out.

Already, he gets a bloody nose at the drop of his hat and there has been more than once where he has woken with blood on his pillows and clotted at the corner of his eyes and pooling, crusty and congealed, in the curve of his ears. It is getting increasingly difficult to eat a full meal or sleep a full night through.

Three months in and he is starting to literally fall apart.

“Quirinus, my boy! I trust you are well?”

He’s not quick enough – or subtle enough – to avoid the Headmaster’s hand coming down on his shoulder, patting him like he’s a bloody dog.

_[anger fear grief anger whodoyouthinkyouare whatdidieverdotoyou getyourfuckinghandoffme iwillbreakyou iwillendyou iwillcrushyoubeneathmyfeet deaddeaddead earthfaildecay danger]_

Never a fan of Dumbledore, he had at least been able to keep his head down and avoid all interactions with the man during his own time at Hogwarts as a student. As a lowly Ravenclaw not particularly worthy of more than a cursory notice, he had managed to go the entire seven years with only two direct interactions with the Headmaster – and one of those had been when the man had handed him his diploma.

But then, after several years of quiet freedom, he had just _had _to become a teacher and now he has to converse with the old man at least twice a day. And that’s if he’s lucky.

He should have listened to his father. Gone into research, maybe. Or warding. Spell creation would have been nice.

“Q-q-quite,” he stutters out and twists his mouth in something that might pass for a smile.

“Good, good,” the old man nods and pats him again

_[red hot surge red no get back dontlethimsee] _

_[I will kill you]_

Quirinus practically slumps beneath the increased pounding in his head.

At six on the dot Snape sweeps through the door and glides over to the table to take his seat, his pale face pinched and his lips flattened into a thin, unhappy line.

_[flare warmth connect mine dull burnished sour betrayal anger confused unsure broken frustration anger]_

_[I tried]_

_[I tried]_

“Ah, Severus, so good of you to join us!” Dumbledore chirps from his place at the head of the table. “Now that everyone is present, let us begin!”

It’s more difficult than it should be to tune out Dumbledore’s incessantly cheerful rambling. Especially when every trumpet of his voice makes it feel like someone is taking a dull axe to the back of his head, his Master’s fury and hatred more cutting than any knife as it slices outward through his mortal flesh. Gritting his teeth against the pain he focuses on pouring himself a cup of tea without spilling. The deep almost-black of the tea gleaming with hints of caramel as is splashes up the side of the cup and swirls around and around…

He adds sugar - two heaping spoons, even though his teeth ache at the thought of it – and a generous splash of milk. He wonders, as he always does, if anyone has noticed how differently he takes his tea these days. Probably not. Quirinus hadn’t been particularly social or friendly even before he’d gone off to Albania. He’s pretty sure not one of them could tell him how _he _took his tea and he had been their student for seven years and their colleague for three. Still, imagining everyone’s reactions to the fact that his master prefers his morning tea sweet enough to rot his teeth straight out of his mouth is enough to make the corners of his lips turn up in a faint smile.

It is the little things, these days.

A plain scone, golden and delicate, is selected and placed on one of the small china plates. He will smear it with some of the marmalade when it gets around to him and pick at it over the course of the meeting. Well meaning busy bodies will make less of his single-piece-of-toast breakfast if they remember him eating now.

By the time he passes the tea service to Filius he’s managed to calm the roar in his head down to a dull, stabbing sort of ache, carefully modulating his breathing until he can feel the beginnings of a meditative state sweep over him.

Breathe in, two, three, four.

Breathe out, six, seven, eight.

Breathe in, two, three, four.

Breathe out, six, seven, eight.

Breathe in, two, three, four.

His hand still shakes as he raises the cup to his lips but the tremors have calmed enough that no on is going to notice unless they’re staring at the surface of his tea.

And the two people in the room observant enough to notice such a small thing – if they’re even bothering to watch him to begin with - are on the wrong side of the table.

Breathe out, six, seven, eight.

Breathe in, two, three, four.

The conversation around him slowly slides into a rumble of voices that is ever so slightly out of focus. His brain still registers the words but the meanings do not sink past the surface of his thoughts. If he needs to he can get his hands on a pensive and look over the beginning of the year Head of House debriefings later but he doubts such a thing will be necessary. It never has.

Instead, he focuses on the slight swirl of the tea as he puts his cup down, on the give of the scone beneath his fingertips and the way it taste both like oranges and like ashes in his mouth, caking itself to the sides of his throat as he tries to swallow.

He takes another sip of tea and turns his attention to more important matters.

Breathe out, six, seven, eight.

Three months and he is beginning to fall apart. Possession is such a tricky topic. So little is actually known but his master has been possessing animals and the occasional muggle for years, hopping bodies whenever the current one is burnt empty beneath the force of his presence. But Quirinus is magical being – a magical _human_ – and not whatever serpent his master had coaxed out of the earth and ensnared. He is a better vessel than some lost and delirious muggle and certainly better than a mere animal. Exponentially. The arithmatical value for _his _body and _his _soul is significantly higher than any of his predecessors. So it should be… not easy, never easy to contain two beings in the structure of one without immediate and definite obliteration of the other, but definitely _easier _than it is. Of this he is sure and the arithmancy is clearly in support of his theory.

And yet…

Breathe in, two, three, four.

Breathe out, six, seven, eight.

Things are not as they should be.

The only thing that Quirinus can think of is that it is partly his fault. His, because he is weak. He is not a squib. He is probably closer than he would like to admit even after spending nearly two decades coming to grips with the fact that he is weaker than most of his contemporaries. His understanding of theory is above average and he has always had a deft touch with beings and creatures but the actual, measurable strength of his magical core is… well.

It is weak.

And his Master’s is _not_.

Even now, as nothing more than a shadow of his former self and lacking physical form Quirinus can feel the tightly coiled power of Lord Voldemort blazing inside of him like a sun.

He had never had the opportunity to meet his master during the height of his powers. Not really. He had seen him once.

Nine years old and tagging along with his dad on a rare trip through Diagon Alley and out of nowhere the entire street had gone… not silent, but quiet enough to catch his attention and the crowds of shoppers had parted and…

There he had been, standing on the steps of Gringotts.

He had been too far away to make out the man’s features, too far away to see any details of his appearance. Instead he had been left with the impression of inky black robes that had pooled like water on the gleaming ivory stems and of height, of how he had towered above everyone else.

He had been too far away to really see him but he had _felt _him.

The weight of his magic had blanketed the entire alley, had slithered and rolled down every side street and through every shop. He had felt it in his bones, seen it when he closed his eyes. Not brightness but the black, consuming spots that come when one stares too long at the sun.

Eighteen years later and Quirinus has never forgotten that moment.

It is the only thing he can think of that can be driving the rapid advancement of his decay: the bottomless well of Lord Voldemort’s power forced into balance with Quirinus’ already flickering flame.

They were supposed to have a year before the situation grew dire. A year to get their hands on the Sorcerer’s Stone.

At this rate he will be severely incapacitated by Yule and dead by the spring equinox.

Unacceptable.

He will just have to push harder. Faster. _Smarter_.

And he will have to start looking into alternatives. Ways to strengthen himself so that he might see his master safely restored.

“…is Harry Potter?”

_[Listen]_

He can hear it like a sigh breathed into his ear.

Obediently, he pulls himself back into the moment and surveys the rest of the table under the guise of reaching for another scone.

Everyone is staring at Snape.

“As I said,” Severus drawls. “My first years have all settled in satisfactorily.”

When it becomes obvious that he does not intend to say anything more Minerva presses her lips so tightly together that they practically disappear and she and Dumbledore exchange weighted glances.

“So you’ve said, my boy, so you’ve said. We just want to make sure he is adjusting well.”

Severus raises a single eyebrow. “There have been no issues in Slytherin House. _As I said_. He studies hard and follows the rules – a novel approach, for a Potter, I must admit,” he adds after another long length of silence. Minerva’s cheeks turn an interesting shade of red and it is likely only Dumbledore’s hand on her arm that prevents her from bolting to her feet and lecturing the Potions Master for speaking ill of the dead. “He gets on well with his dorm mates – particularly with Mr. Malfoy and Mr. Zabini – and is polite with the upper years. My prefects speak well of him.”

“As do mine,” Pomona agrees, nodding her head. “Miss Abbott and Miss Bones seem quite taken with him. They’ve formed quite the little group, haven’t they? With the Slytherin boys as well as Miss Brocklehurst and Mr. Longbottom.”

“It’s positively delightful!” Filius agrees from next to him. “They’re very inquisitive and they work well together.”

“Be that as it may,” Minerva protests, “but it has created some friction in the Gryffindor dorms as Mr. Longbottom has not deigned to get actually get to know his own dorm mates.”

“Oh, honestly, Minnie,” Pomona clucks. “Can you blame the poor boy? He might be a Gryffindor but he’s much quieter than the rest of your boys! Doesn’t have much interest in running rabid all over the castle and zooming all over the quidditch pitch, does he? He’s got a dab hand with the plants though. Absolutely inspired! Which reminds me, I’ve noticed that he is using a second hand wand. It won’t cause him much trouble in the greenhouses but elsewhere…”

Filius nods seriously. “I had noticed as well. I understand it is a family wand?”

“His father’s,” Dumbledore acknowledges with a nod. “I’m afraid Lady Longbottom is quite insistent that he use it.”

“Well that hardly seems fair!” Pomona protests instantly and Quirinus obligingly nods his head in agreement with the rest majority of the table.

“That could cause some serious harm to his magical growth,” Septima adds, her husky voice practically a growl. “As an adult it’s less of a big deal, magically speaking, to use a wand that’s not bonded properly but as a child… _Albus_!”

At the head of the table Dumbledore sighs heavily. “I’m afraid Mr. Longbottom has minimal magical ability to begin with,” he admits quietly. “It was questionable for quite some time whether he even had enough qualify for admittance. It seemed like such a horrible thing to have to tell a child, though, especially one who has looked forward to coming to school for so long – to follow in his parents’ footsteps.” Removing his glasses, he rubs a weary hand across his eyes. “Perhaps it will prove to be a mistake, especially in the later years, but for now he should be able to complete the coursework if he puts in enough effort. And with so little magical ability it would prove difficult for him to properly bond with a wand at all. Lady Longbottom thought – and I agree – that the emotional component to wielding his father’s wand might ultimately prove in his favor.”

Minerva says nothing. She simply sits there, her lips vanished again, presumably having heard this before. Poor Pomona looks like she is about to burst into tears and Severus… Severus is staring up the table at Dumbledore with narrowed eyes.

The curl of his master’s interest is heat spreading through his veins, bubbling and prickling beneath his skin.

_[caught cautious curious wondering]_

_[heknows whatdoesheknow alwaysosmart donotunderestimatehim]_

“Now,” the Headmaster says gently, “I believe we were talking about Mr. Potter.”

Aurora nearly rolls her eyes. “I’m not sure that there is much left to talk about. He’s settled in well. He has a group of friends. What more is there to talk about?”

Dumbledore tips his head and peers at them over the top of his glasses, a look of benign disappointment “How is he doing in his classes? Severus mentioned that he spends a significant amount of time studying. Is he having difficulties?”

The small smile on Severus’ face is positively feral. “Not at all,” he replies silkily and Filius _giggles_.

“The opposite, I would say,” the little half goblin announces cheerfully and Quirinus can’t help but agree with assessment. He wants to dislike the boy that caused his Master’s downfall, wants to despise him with every single ounce of his being but Harry Potter has proven very hard to dislike on a moment to moment basis. He is an intelligent, thoughtful student who – as Severus had noted – pays admirable note to his schoolwork and doesn’t cause trouble or excessive noise. More than that, though, the boy has a _gift_. Even as a first year with only a month of occasionally questionable education he casts like he was born with a wand in his hand: smooth, steady, no hesitation, and with reflexes that would make champion duelers stop and stare. The boy will be an impressive force someday. Merlin, he is an impressive force _now_. At _eleven_. “If anything, I suspect Mr. Potter will soon grow bored with our lessons, if he hasn’t already.”

Dumbledore blinks rapidly behind his half-moon glasses, genuine surprise crossing his face. “…bored?” he repeats rather incredulously.

Quirinus almost feels insulted on behalf of the boy. _Of course_, he is going to get bored, stuck tumbling with the rest of the children when the boy’s magic practically sings beneath his skin. Hogwarts does not foster greatness. Not now. Not for some time. It leashes it and corrals it. Teaches it to fall in line, to set itself aside and not reach for things beyond the reach of regular beings.

The curl of his master’s agreement is an echo in his mouth.

Filius nods. He’s not the only one. Quirinus catches his own chin moving up and down without his knowledge. “He has his mother’s knack for charms.”

“Aye,” Minerva agrees, albeit reluctantly. “Not just in charms. He’s not as showy as James was but he has all of his skill.”

Pomona and Aurora offer their own words of praise for Mr. Potter’s skill and even Severus acknowledges that the Boy Who Lived “can be trusted not to blow up himself, his classmates, or the classroom”, which from Severus is enough praise to make the entire staff stare at him for a full minute in silent shock.

“And you, Quirinus? Does Mr. Potter do well in your class?”

“Q-q-quite,” he stutters out with a small smile. “H-he i-is a n-n-natural. A-as one m-m-might expect.”

Again, a faint curl of pleasure not his own winds through the ache in his bones.

_[curious pleased worry proud ofcourseheis mine danger] _

_[equal]_

Quirinus blinks.

“Ah,” Dumbledore takes a long sip of his tea. “I am pleased to hear it. Keep an eye on the situation. It would not do for our students to find their education lacking.”

At the other end of the table, Severus raises a single, scathing eyebrow.

“Now. Are there any other first year matters that need our attention?” the Headmaster pushes onward, his curiosity apparently satisfied on the subject of the Boy Who Lived.

“Actually,” Aurora speaks up, “Minerva, I was wondering if you might speak to your Miss Granger…”

Quirinus goes back to his tea.

And his breathing exercises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I'm so glad everyone enjoyed the last chapter and Poppy's background. I do that (or more) with pretty much every character so I'm happy to continue sharing bits and pieces that might not make it into the story. I've been toying with making a reference work in this series to share pieces of world/character building that might not come up or get explored in great depth in the actual stories. Thoughts?
> 
> A note on magical power/measurable ability (since it is brought up a few times in this chapter and full disclosure that this is all in my head): One's magical core exists as a quantifiable amount. Think of it like a rechargeable battery. Muggles register as a 0 and _occasionally_ as a 1 - not enough ability to even have the appropriate neural pathways for magic but enough that they get "feelings" or have an uncanny knack for always succeeding in a certain area.  
Squibs, while commonly defined as those who are born to a magical family but possess no magic themselves, are actually those who have the magical core and neural pathways but not enough power to actually make it all work and register as something between 2-9. (Filch is a 3. Mrs. Figg is a 6. Petunia and Dudley are both 5s.)
> 
> Registering as a 10 is enough to make you a proper, actual wizard (ie: capable of "proper" magic with a wand) and is considered the absolute minimal amount required to attend Hogwarts. Most (90+%) wizards and witches register as somewhere between 12-15. It is important to note that one's magical ability does not take into account intelligence/IQ, bloodline abilities (parseltongue, metamorphagus, prophecy, necromancy etc), learned talents (Animagus), or natural talents/abilities (suitability to certain subjects or types of magic, being a natural Legilimens/Occlumens etc). One's measurable level doesn't settle/solidify until after your magical majority around the age of 17 but it's measurable enough before than that there generally aren't very many surprises (and you're certainly able to tell whether you're a squib or a "proper" wizard.) 
> 
> I won't get into it here because it will eventually come up in the main story but one's ability with proper/legal/light magic has nothing to do with your ability to practice dark magic. While most people's cores develop an affinity for certain types and branches of magic it is entirely possible for a weak wizard (like Quirrell) or even a squib to be a successful dark wizard/witch.
> 
> For reference: Quirrell is an 11. Ron and Hermione are both a 14. Both Scamander brothers were/are 15s, but I headcanon Newt as falling on the autistic spectrum and as such most people tend to peg him for an 11 or 12. Snape is a respectable 16 but everyone tends to assign him an extra level or two because of brilliance and sheer overall intimidation. Dumbledore and Grindelwald are both 18s, which tends to be the benchmark level where titles like "Dark Lord" come into play. Merlin was a 19. Tom Marvolo Riddle was (and will be) an unprecedented 20. 
> 
> Quirrell will definitely get some more stage time but I feel it important to emphasis the difference between how Dumbledore sees Quirrell and who Quirrell actually is. On the surface (and thus to Dumbledore) Quirrell is a half-blood Ravenclaw who is significantly more intelligent and curious than powerful, which is obviously what leads him into a sticky situation w/ Voldemort. He's a safe/not evil, foolish boy who got in over his head messing with things he obviously couldn't understand. 
> 
> In actuality, Quirinus Quirrell is a highly intelligent - if magically weak - man. His father is a blue collar pureblood (who works making magical furniture) and an unmarked supporter of Voldemort (well, of the political activism of "Voldemort and the Knights of Walpurgis" and less so of "Voldemort and the Death Eaters" and their inclination towards torture and mass destruction). His mother is a squib from a neutral/gray minded family who was sent off to muggle boarding schools. She met and fell in love with Quirrell's father in her teens and now works/lives in the muggle world. Depending on definitions and technicalities this either makes him a half-blood or a pureblood, though most assume his mother is a muggle and identify him as the former. He is currently 27 (putting him in his 7th year when Harry "vanquished" Voldemort) and he taught as the Muggle Studies professor for two years before taking a sabbatical year and then returning as the DADA professor. He has a younger sister who was a Hufflepuff. Slightly more powerful and with a talent for clothing charms and transfigurations she works as an assistant in Madam Malkins shop. All three of his immediate family members are still alive.
> 
> And I was going to ramble about Neville and his wand here because I have So. Many. Feelings. on the topic but this note is horrendously long so I'm leaving it for now because it definitely comes up again!


	7. Belonging (Hermione)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chronologically this takes place sometime between chapters 11 and 13 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show but can be read anytime after chapter 8.

“He’s not going to call on you.”

Hermione pauses in her attempts to fit her notes back into her bag, automatically flinching away from the voice beside her, arms clutching her notes to her chest to protect them. She doesn’t _think_ he’ll knock her notes to the floor but she’d rather be careful instead of proven wrong. She doesn’t have time to redo her notes just because some _bully_ decides to stomp all over them. Not that she thinks he’s a bully, of course. He’s in all the history books and his story is so sad and he sounds so brave and she doesn’t understand why he isn’t in Gryffindor. Everyone thought he’d be. They all say it. He should be a lion. That horrid Weasley boy likes to go on and on about it. Half the younger years think he’s been _cursed_ and one of them had some something about the _Imperius_ and she doesn’t know what that _is_. A spell, obviously, but what kind? She means to look it up in the library but she keeps getting distracted. There’s just so much _there_, so much learn, and she has to make sure her homework is _just right_ and… Honestly, it’s not like Professor Dumbledore would let a student get _cursed _in his school so really, it’s just a matter of curiosity and….

“Why wouldn’t he?” Hermione snaps, unable to stop from bristling. “I know the answer!”

And she _does_.

She can’t understand why he sweeps around the room and takes away points from Gryffindor for none of them knowing the answer when she _does _know the answer and she’s _right here_. Does he think she’s lying? That she’s too stupid to know the answer because she grew up with…with _muggle _parents?

Hermione has always been different. As a baby she was apparently so quiet and self-sufficient that her parents still joke about “_such an easy baby, we nearly forgot she was there!_”– bottles and blankets and binkies seeming to appear in her crib or playpen even though her parents had no memory of bringing them to her. It would be hurtful but she can see how uncomfortable talking about it makes them, how quick they are to offer a token laugh and change the topic.

She was different as a child: quiet and serious and an early reader, more content to sit with a pile of books or perhaps a piece of paper and a crayon to practice her letters while other kids explored playgrounds and built towers with blocks. She was different in primary school – she looked different and odd things happened around her and she had a strange name that no one could pronounce and while her peers were busy trying to stumble their way through _Green Eggs and Ham _she was traveling to Wonderland with Alice and sailing on the high seas with Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins. No one liked that she knew all the answers and no one liked when she tried to help them. Instead, they would pull her hair and call her a _bushy bookworm_ and _bucktooth _and other names that her mum would have washed her mouth out with soap if _she _had dared call someone that. And when she tried to be their friend, they would chase her away and throw her books and she just doesn’t _understand._

But then, a week before her eleventh birthday, the most wonderful woman had shown up on their doorstep. Hermione remembers how stern she had looked, dressed smartly in a long black skirt, a cream-colored blouse buttoned all the way to the base of her throat, and an impossibly soft looking tartan shawl draped across her shoulders. Her name was Minerva McGonagall, she had explained, and she was the Deputy Headmistress at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and she was here because young Hermione was a witch.

Her parents had laughed and blustered all the way up until the moment when the woman had changed into a cat right before their eyes and then changed back before summoning a tea service from their kitchen with a flick of her wand and settling down on their sofa like she belonged there.

_A witch_.

Everything had suddenly made so much more sense! Hermione isn’t weird – she isn’t strange or abnormal! She is just a _witch_! She’s _supposed_ to be different!

And oh, she had been so happy to know that there were others like her, that she had somewhere to belong and Diagon Alley had been a _marvel _and so exciting and that _bookstore_…

Well. She had read and read and read so that she wouldn’t be behind and had practiced and sat up in the evenings memorizing spells and potions ingredients and interesting facts because she wanted to make sure that everyone _knew_ she was a witch too. That she _belonged _with them.

But… but it hasn’t been like that.

Her housemates aren’t like the brave, chivalrous people they are supposed to be. Her dormmates aren’t interested in anything that is _actually_ interesting. They just want to talk about makeup and boys and when they’ll get their _period_ and finally be _women_ and really, it’s not so different from all the other girls Hermione has known except they use wands to apply their lip gloss instead of tubes and it’s not _fair. _And no one will talk to her and no one is excited about magic like she is and…

Harry Potter leans against the worktop looking so put together and _cool, _like wearing robes over proper clothes isn’t awkward and strange, though it isn’t for _him _Hermione imagines. He’s the Boy Who Lived. He’s always belonged. She feels a pang of envy when she looks him, jealousy and fury working through her veins in equal measure. It’s not _his _fault that he arrived at school with a group of friends that like to follow him everywhere or that everything seems to come effortlessly to him in class but it’s so _unfair. _She wants that. She wants to _belong_. And she’s trying so hard – _so hard_ – to prove that she does belong here, that she’s one of them, that’s she’s a witch _too_ but no one will _let her_ and it’s all so new and she misses her mum and dad and having her own room and.._. _Hermione forces herself to take a deep breath and focus on her classmate instead of all the thoughts running through her head.

He offers her what Hermione thinks might be a smile but it’s tight around his mouth. “And he _knows _you know,” Potter explains.

Hermione wants to scoff. “Well then why doesn’t he _call on me_?” Her voice is a little shrill at the end and she can’t _help it_ because she is so _frustrated_ she just wants to_ cry_.

“Well, for starters,” Potter says with a quirk of his lips that is somehow both amused _and _annoyed at the same time, “you’re in Gryffindor. Snape will look out for you and keep you safe but he’s not going to do anything that might mean giving you approval or points. It’s… a _thing _with him.” Potter rolls his eyes and Hermione can’t help but feel scandalized at such disrespect. For a _teacher_. Professor Snape might ignore her and be a bit of a…of a _bully _but anyone with eyes can see he’s brilliant. She’s read all about him in _Hogwarts, A History _and _Important Witches and Wizards of the Twentieth Century_. He’s the most prominent Potions Master in Britain and earned his mastery earlier than anyone has in the last _five centuries_.

And it’s not even _true_. Professor Snape calls on Longbottom _and _gives him points! Not a lot and not often but he _does _which doesn’t even make sense because Longbottom is _horrible _at potions. Well, not as bad as Finnigan who is always blowing his cauldron up, _honestly_, if he would just _read the directions _but still, Longbottom’s potions never end up _quite _right. Not like _hers_. 

“But that’s not fair!”

Potter shrugs. “It’s Snape. Fair really isn’t in his vocabulary.”

_Professor _Snape, Hermione wants to correct, “But if he would just _ask me_…”

“Look,” Potter sighs and runs a hand over his hair. It’s entirely pulled back today and tied in a bit of a braid at the base of his neck. She’s noticed that he tends to do that on days when they have Potions. Otherwise he leaves most of it down, tying back just enough of it to bare that lighting bolt scar and keep it out of his eyes. “He grades your essays, doesn’t he? I’m sure he leaves dozens of comments and you pass, don’t you? Probably with at least an EE every time,” he adds and Hermione can’t help but huff at that because it has been an EE _every time_. She doesn’t understand why he’s never given her an O. She always answers the questions thoroughly with lots of references and she even writes more than she’s supposed to because she wants to make sure that Professor Snape knows that she’s not just going through the motions like so many of her classmates and besides, it’s all so _fascinating_ she really couldn’t cut anything out. “So obviously he knows that you know.”

Hermione thinks if he tells her that one more time she just might scream. Because that’s not the same. That’s _different_. Homework can be done next to open books and all the notes she takes in class. It’s no real test of acquired knowledge, in her opinion. So how can Professor Snape know that she’s prepared for class if he doesn’t allow her to _tell him_?

Her thoughts must show rather clearly on her face because Potter stares at her for a minute and sighs. “Everyone is aware of how smart you are Granger. You’re the smartest in our year,” he says but he’s lying because she’s _not_. He _is_ and she finds it insulting that he’s trying to pretend otherwise. She can handle being second place to the Boy Who Lived but it still stings her pride a bit after a lifetime of always being the smartest in the class. “But Snape’s not one to let people show off,” and Potter is saying something else but Hermione can’t hear him over the sudden roaring in her ears.

“I do not show off!” She snaps and feels her hair bristling around her like some stupid, angry cat. “I’m not showing off!” she repeats. “He asks the class a question and I know the answer! That’s not _showing off_!”

“He’s probably asking the question because not everyone is as bloody good at essays as you are, are they? Or practical application,” Potter retorts sharply and then promptly turns away, wincing. “That’s not… argh. I just mean that not everyone learns the same way as you or understands things as well as you do, Granger. And Snape’s a bit of a git but he does try to make sure that everyone has a basic understanding of things – if for no other reason than to keep us from accidentally killing ourselves.”

“So now I’m being punished for being smart,” Hermione hisses and she can’t help herself, she’s so _tired _of this. Of not having a place and being treated like she doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the effort because she’s smart and isn’t interested in things like clothes and nail polish and silly _games_.

“No. That’s not…”

“Good afternoon,” she says firmly, staring at the floor. “I hope you have a pleasant weekend,” she adds because she won’t stoop to their level. She _won’t. _Forgoing fitting her notes into her bag she simply hugs them tighter to her chest with hand, slings her bag over her shoulder, and marches out of the potions classroom before she can do something ridiculous like _cry_.

“Granger, wait!” Potter’s voice echoes in the corridor behind her but she keeps her head down and walks faster. “Hermione…! Damnit!” Distantly, before she turns the corner she hears a dull _thud_ and she doesn’t know what it is but she hopes he walked into the door or dropped his bag on his foot or… or…

She doesn’t stop walking until she gets to the library, to the table in the little alcove in the back tucked between the Charms and Transfiguration sections. It’s empty, thankfully. Sometimes it’s not. Some of the older years seem to think that it’s an appropriate place to do _kissing_ and…and _other things_ but she always stops them because that’s against the rules and this a _library_ and…

Hermione plops down on a chair and lets her potions notes fall to the table. She doesn’t cry but her eyes prick uncomfortably as she methodically makes herself organize the parchment into the correct order and then file it with the rest of her notes and organizing her bag so that everything fits in its spot once again. By the time she’s done she feels a little calmer and so _silly _and _stupid _for storming away from Harry Potter of all people but he just… it’s clear that he just doesn’t understand and that there’s nothing she can say to make him see just how unfair Professor Snape is being and…

She makes herself take a deep breath.

She’ll write a letter to her parents. That’s what she’ll do. She’ll tell them about all the interesting things she’s learning and by then she should be calm enough to give her homework the focus that it deserves.

Because she’s a witch and she belongs here and she’ll _prove it_.

She _will_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TBH, I'm kind of nervous on this one. I'm always fascinated by other writers' individual interpretation of her character. Personally, I've always loved her and been frustrated by her simultaneously, largely because I see so much of myself in her.
> 
> I hc that Harry has NO IDEA how to talk to preteen/early teen Hermione both as his reincarnated 18 year old self or his original self. Largely because I think that despite being close (and good) friends they have such differing life experiences that they have little to no framework for the other's viewpoint and it's not until after their battle at the Ministry (or really, in some ways, until after Ron leaves them while they're hunting Horcruxes) that they establish a friendship of equals.


	8. Uttermost Speed and Discretion (Original Character)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like the last chapter this one chronologically takes place sometime between chapters 11 and 13 but it can be read any time after chapter 9 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show.
> 
> This is also the first chapter to feature a true OC (Two, technically. Three if you count the dog.) I'm not sure if we'll see this character again but I wanted to take the opportunity of the Peanut Gallery setting to get out and explore the wizarding world a bit and what might exist there (or does, in this reality) beyond the narrow view presented in canon. Harry doesn't exist in a vacuum and I think it is important to acknowledge events and people that he might not see but, inevitably, affect him. 
> 
> There will probably be at least three more Peanut Gallery chapters going up over the course of the next week (hopefully) before I finish up/post the next chapter of the main fic. Mainly because I want to get all the Halloween POVs out before Harry starts dealing with the after.

The office is barely more than two small rooms on the ground floor of a cramped building in one of the little side alleys shoved in that nebulous area that’s not _quite _Diagon Alley but not properly Knockturn Alley either. It’s a prime location, no matter what anyone says, because they can deal with all sorts without much notice from the rest of the population. In fact, most of the wizarding world doesn’t realize that the office exists, eyes drifting past the pristine, windowless white door and the carefully curtained windows with their flower filled planter boxes beneath. The sign over the door says _Morrison & Jones_ but unless you have an appointment you will never quite remember that it’s there.

Inside the walls are painted a soft cream and are bare save for a large wrought iron clock and a non-magical oil landscape depicting the cliffs of Dover during a storm. The furniture is aged but well cared for, obviously antiques – not just old but the sort that is presumably handed down from generation to generation – and feature a blue velvet sofa set across from two wingback chairs upholstered in a delicate cream and gold paisley. Between them is a low table set with a full tea service. An assortment of plants grow from colored pots set on a spiral staircase in the corner of the room, vines and blooms reaching for the light that filters in through the delicate curtains. The perisan rug set on the floor is thick enough and soft enough to sleep on. Frankly, the whole thing looks more like someone’s living room than an office.

The second space is more functional: a pair of wide desks face each other across the room. There’s a lone, curtained window with a bowl of owl treats balanced on the windowsill breaking up a wall of bookcases filled with books that no one ever sees and a single filing cabinet in one corner with a coat rack in the other. There’s another clock, smaller and more muggle looking hanging on the wall dividing the two rooms and the dark wood floors continue, albeit with no rugs. There is, however, a plush looking cushion sitting on the floor next to one of the desks.

“Morning, James,” Martin Jones greets cheerfully as he strides into the backroom and tosses his robes over the back of his chair with the ease of long practice. A fawn pug with a braided purple collar trots at his heels, tongue hanging and wheezing happily.

James Morrison, already seated at his desk across the room, grunts and takes another sip of his tea. “You got that contract finalized for the Smiths?” he says by way of any other greeting but Martin doesn’t miss the way his partner reaches down with his free hand to give Essie head scratches and then calmly offers her a dog biscuit from the stash that he keeps in the top drawer of his desk. She snatches it up with a pleased little _woof_ and then prances back across the room to show it to him before collapsing on her bed.

“Picked it a few minutes ago,” Martin tells him and sets his coffee and the muffins he grabbed for breakfast down on his desk. “I’ve got an appointment with _Lady_ Beatrice…” here he pauses and both men roll their eyes “…this morning at eleven to go over it. I also put in a call to the permit office in Blackawton for Mr. Vessey. I’ll apparate out at lunch and check my messages but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a day or two for them to get back to us. Will probably pop up to Edinburgh after and start looking into that bloke of Miss Mackenzie’s. Not much else on my plate today. What about you?”

James picks up a piece of folded parchment and waves it in the air. “Just need to finish up that report for Samuels and then it’s on to the new: got a letter from the Hunters – remember them? Benjamin and Gwen?”

Martin bobs his head thoughtfully as he sorts through the stack of newspapers sitting on the top of his desk. One of them is the _Prophet_, of course, but the other dozen are various muggle publications from around Britain. 

“… muggles, right? We helped them set up a Gringotts account and liaised with St. Mungos on behalf of their little girl… two years ago?”

“Three,” James corrects.

“Christ, I’m getting old.”

“You’re twenty-four,” James deadpans. Martin waves it off. He _feels _a lot older than twenty-four. But he’s been out of Hogwarts for six years now and they’ve been running this place for almost five so he supposes the age must be right. His muggle upbringing is probably to blame, he muses. Six years out of school and working still makes him envision someone significantly closer to thirty, factoring in a general assumption of university attendance. “Anyway,” continues James. “Their younger daughter just got her first Hogwarts letter…”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Martin perks up instantly, beaming. Both of his sisters are muggles just like his parents – or so he assumes, they might all be squibs and he just doesn’t know it - and he loves them but he’s wished more than once in the last decade that one or both of them were magical as well. He’s still close with his parents – even keeps a separate phone line at their house where he’s turned his old room into a makeshift office for when he needs to deal exclusively with muggle technology but that same warmth and closeness doesn’t quite extend to his sisters. They’re still friendly, they’re just not _close, _not like they were before he got his Hogwarts letter and then more or less disappeared for seven years. “Did you…”

“…I’ve already sent the gift basket, yes. We need more chocolate frogs though. We’re running low,” James shoots him a glare and Martin just shrugs and gives him an unapologetic look. He gets munchy when he’s stressed _and _his dad is still moaning about how he’s missing Rowena Ravenclaw’s card so he figures it’s his duty as a good son to find it for the man, whose own search is somewhat hindered by being both diabetic _and _a muggle. “I’ve also got a letter from a Mr. John Davies. He’s a muggleborn, only child, and needs some help organizing care for his widowed mother. Her dementia is starting to get worse and both he and his wife think that moving her into a magical household will cause more problems than help at this point.”

Martin winces. “Poor bastard,” he mutters and James makes a humming noise of agreement. Hard enough to watch your parents age and grow unwell but to be in a position where even your presence might aggravate things? Christ, that’s rough. “You need any help?”

James waves him off. “Not currently but I’ll let you know.”

Now that they’re all caught up the office descends into silence as they work, Martin with a ball point ben clutched between his teeth as he takes his morning tour through the stack of papers. Their business as equal parts lawyer, personal assistant, and private investigator for their clients – acting as the middle man when magical and muggle worlds need to interact but aren’t quite sure _how _because god knows the Ministry is full of incompetent morons – operates almost entirely by word of mouth but they’ve landed a few jobs from keeping an eye on current events and spotting places where their presence might be appreciated. Plus, knowing how the latest football and rugby matches went goes a long way to helping him fit in when he’s out and about in the muggle world.

It’s been nearly an hour, he’s long since finished his breakfast and is thinking about taking a short break to throw a few toys around for Essie and maybe taking her to see if she needs a potty break when there comes a distinctive _tap, tap, tap_ at the window.

“I got it,” he says to James, who doesn’t even bother to look up. James grunts.

The owl at the window is a common barn owl, pretty though, and she holds out her leg imperiously for him to take the letter from her leg. Whoever sent her must not need an immediate response because she takes off again as soon as the envelope is in his hands, not even bothering to wait around for a treat, which is just weird but Martin shrugs and shuts the window.

The envelope in his hand is a plain, standard envelope that you can pick up in bulk at any of the dozen of stationary stores that exist between the magical alleys in London and Hogsmeade. _Morrison & Jones _is written across the outside in the distinctive loopy letter of a dicto-quill with plain black ink. It’s sealed with a dollop of plain black wax, no formal seal.

“Hmm,” Martin makes a curious noise in his throat and takes it back to his desk. A standard round of screening spells reveal a few subtle, if powerful, privacy charms but nothing else so he opens it and pulls out the piece of parchment resting inside. The message isn’t very long – not much more than a few lines – and written in the same dicto-quill font but it makes his eyebrows climb clear off his forehead. The single, distinctive, hand scrawled letter at the end of the note seals the deal.

James must notice because he asks, “Something wrong?” from the other side of the room.

Martin shakes his head. “No, nothing wrong but I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Might not get as much done for Mackenzie as I wanted to.”

“Oh?” James actually puts down his quill and looks up at him.

“Got another job,” Martin says with a wave of the letter. “From the professor.”

James blinks once: long and slow before giving a decisive nod. “Let me know if you need me to take over the Mackenzie case.”

Martin nods absentmindedly, already knowing that that is what will probably happen. The professor doesn’t send them many jobs but when he does, they come first. He has helped them both in too many ways – even though the man would sneer and deny it – for them to do anything else. “Probably best to plan on it,” he says, “but I’ll let you know after this afternoon.”

Reaching for his pen he notes down the vital information from the note onto the top sheet of the spiral bound muggle notebook he keeps on his desk. Then he holds the parchment carefully over the garbage bin under his desk and lights it on fire with the tip of his wand. He watches until the entire thing has disappeared into flame and ash, taking any evidence of the Professor’s involvement with it.

> _I require a complete dossier on one Petunia Diane Evans (maiden name), date of birth 16 April 1957. Born and raised in Cokeworth, the Midlands. Married sometime in 1978. _
> 
> _Uttermost speed and discretion required._
> 
> _S_


	9. Something Wicked This Way Comes (Lucius)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first of the Halloween chapters. Can be read anytime after chapter 13 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show".
> 
> Also, note that I've finally slapped a rating on this thing. It's important because **this chapter contains a graphic depiction of animal sacrifice**. It's not super violent or full of explicit gore but it is graphic and takes up a noticeable part of the chapter. No actual animals were harmed in the making of this fanfic. 
> 
> This chapter is also a legit chapter sized chapter. I'm not sure how that happened. I wrote what I thought was most of it a long time ago (like, way back when I wrote the chapter of Harry boarding the Hogwarts Express over in the main fic) and figured I just needed to smooth out the edges, maybe give it a bit of intro for context... But here we are, 2500 additional words later. So... I hope you enjoy it! Next time we'll be back to Snape.

The sun has not yet crested the horizon, the entire world a study of grays and slowly lightening indigos as Lucius slips from the manor, shutting the door quietly behind him. The flagstones of the back patio are cold against his bare feet, cold enough that he curls his toes and hisses at the discomfort but he doesn’t turn back. Instead, he inhales deeply and lets the cold of the morning slide down his throat and settle inside his chest.

It feels like coming home.

It feels like the first time he knelt at the Dark Lord’s feet, magic coiled around him, rubbing up against him like smoke, like water until it consumed him, until he was nothing but the burn on his arm and the chill settling behind his ribs. It feels like even earlier - like dumb suppers spent squirming in his seat and biting his tongue so that he doesn’t ruin the ritual of it. Like the scent of incense, heady and sweet, tickling at his nose and sinking into his clothes as it burns. Like the rumble of his father’s voice as he showed him how to walk their lands and the chiming of his mother’s laugh.

It feels like standing beside his mother’s grave. Six years old and not understanding, only knowing that she was gone. His father’s hand on his shoulder had been the only thing keeping him from disappearing into the cold that settled into his bones, from sinking down into the absence of everything until there was nothing of Lucius left.

It feels like Before – Before everything was lost to fear and chaos, when there was still hope left in the world. When they still had a chance. Before they stumbled and fell, a long descent brought up short – a sudden stop that left them dead and dangling.

But for just just a moment, as he walks across the frozen lawn, everything is quiet and still, heavy with waiting, and he can pretend that it will be alright. That he won’t likely live to see the end of the world he loves. That he won’t have to watch as entire branches of magic turn to ash and drift away, lost to them forever. That he won’t have to watch all that they are, all that they used to be, disappear beneath the oncoming horde. Devoured by _progress. _

He aches, deep in the cold that lives in his chest, to set fire to them all. To watch his world burn rather than to see it suppressed and erased.

And maybe he will, before the end.

He’s not a Black with madness swimming in his veins but Malfoys are their own brand of destructive force. It’s been centuries since they’ve used it somewhere besides a boardroom or halls of government power but they were warriors once – _have always been warriors_, his mind corrects, sounding so much like his father. They have always been movers and shakers, smooth tongued snakes that fight like a devil when pressed, have been since Armand broke faith and bond with his family to follow the Bastard. _Bad Faith_, they had called him, but the founder of his line had stood at William’s side for years, had crossed the channel with him and fought at side. Family lore had it that he had been with William when he had clashed with Godwinson on the field at Hastings, that together they had killed him with sword and wand, had torn him apart, paving the way for the Conqueror to take control of England.

Maybe it is time to take up that mantle again, to remember that they wield weapons other than money and influence.

It is not the first time he has had this thought but maybe it is time to start giving it the consideration it deserves.

The coop that houses the peacocks is a fair distance from the manor proper, out past the lawns and the formal gardens, nestled between the orchard and the grove of oak and hawthorn and ash that has stood sentry on the land since before the Conqueror himself gifted it to Armand in reward for his years of loyalty and service. The birds themselves – and thus the coop – are a relatively new addition to the estate. The original trio of birds had been a wedding gift from his mother, brought with her from France, that his father had doted on and expanded into a proper flock even before his mother’s death. After his mother had died because of complications while giving birth to his stillborn brother his father had become almost obsessed with the birds, retreating into them in his grief. As a child, Lucius remembers loving and hating the birds in equal measure. By the time he had made it through the tumultuous waves of puberty he had been profoundly grateful for the graceful animals who were his father’s near constant companions. Now, he keeps them and nurtures them in his father’s stead, presiding over each new generation with a poignant affection. 

The birds, well use to his comings and goings, stir but make little noise as he slips down the wide stone-paved corridor separating some of the smaller pens until he arrives at the one holding this spring’s chicks. They’re juveniles now, just over half a year old, and are beginning to outgrow the awkward mis-feathered look of teenage poultry. Their feathers are sleek and white, only a few retaining the more buff and mottled looks of their younger selves around their legs and tails. His favorite, a young hen, breaks from the huddle as soon as he appears in the door.

“Hello, my dear,” he greets quietly, crouching down to run his fingers over the soft plume of feathers rising from her head. “Today is the day, I am afraid.” The bird lets out an inquisitive sort of noise, nudging at his hand, searching for any treats that he might be hiding from her. He strokes her again to detract from the fact that he _doesn’t _have any for her – a first, in her experience. “Come along,” he murmurs, standing and calming dissuading any of her pen mates – their attention roused by the possibility of treats - from following her out into the corridor.

Back outside, Lucius pauses to shift his robes against the bite of the breeze beginning to pick up. At his feet his pale shadow pecks at the hem of his robes, fascinated by the way they shift and pool around him. For a moment they make him think of his Death Eater robes, though there is nothing similar between the two items save for the deep, inky color. These robes are little more than a rectangle, attached with a few seams to form a place for him to slide his arms, and open in the front, their volume of plain, if luxurious cotton, providing the only cover between the elements and his bare skin. His Death Eater robes are finally tailored works of acromantula silk, feather light and worn over closely fitted dragonhide body armor. This morning’s robes are fluid because of the cut, moving because of the force of his own movements or the rush of the wind. His Death Eater robes practically have a life of their own, so in tune with his magic that they are a physical extension of it, shifting and flowing with nary a thought, like a muscle memory so deep that it simply just _happens_.

He misses them.

Misses them like he misses so many other things that are lost to him, perhaps forever. Another piece of his world fading from existence.

“Come along,” he murmurs to the bird again and sets off towards the grove, content that she will follow after him as she has for nearly every day of her short life.

The grove is an ancient, hallowed thing: dark and deep and still in a way that only an ancient forest can be. Both the wood for his private wand and the family wand had been harvested here, selected by his own hands and those of Armand himself, respectively. Someday Draco will fetch the wood for his own wand as well, one crafted in tune with his blood and soul. Will it be Hawthorn like the wand that chose him at Ollivander's ? Oak like Armand’s? Could it be elm like Lucius’ own or perhaps something else entirely? Ash or laurel or holly? Perhaps even fir, though it has been centuries since a Malfoy has wielded a wand of fir harvested from their own land.

And what of Draco’s son or sons? Will they even exist or is Lucius doomed not only to witness the end of magic as they know it but the end of his line as well? They hover so close to extinction already. Once the Malfoys had been numerous. The house that Armand had built, The Lodge, had been a large home capable of housing dozens without feeling overfull and yet his line had overrun it. The Manor, built a scarce three hundred and fifty years ago, is nearly three times its size and capable of hosting multiple families and all of their attendants in each of its wings and yet for all of its size it has spent most of the last century empty.

His father had been the oldest of three sons, a boon considering _his_ father’s younger brother had married into the Lovegood family and forsaken his name to keep theirs alive. In the end, even that hadn’t mattered, both of Abraxas’ younger brothers dead before they could add to the next generation.

Recognizing their decline from the days when their blood and name had spread across Europe and been part of most British families, the Malfoys had sought a match between their heir and a Weasley, a family famed for their fertility when that of so many others were failing. Thrice they had vowed in blood, magic, and faith and all three vows had been broken when the young woman had eloped with a muggleborn from the village and refused to honor the pacts that not just her family but that she, herself, had made. The bond between families had been broken, marred beyond repair. The Malfoys had named them oath breakers, bond breakers, and blood traitors. The magic of such broken promises had eaten the Weasleys alive, toppling a once great house into pittance and ruin. The young woman had found herself dogged with bad luck: no home or job that could keep her for long, her husband killed in a chance accident while working in their orchard, and her womb rendered painful and barren. She had died young and painfully. Her name no longer spoken.

Magic, after all, does not like to be denied or perverted once set upon its course.

Abraxas had gone on to meet Lucius mother while studying in France: a love match if there ever was one with dreams of scores of children. But here Lucius is, their only living issue.

And he hasn’t done any better, has he? Despite their efforts otherwise, he and Cissa have but one child – a child who exists only by grace of magic itself and Severus’ sheer, unparalleled brilliance in the subject of potions. It had been four years of failure before Draco had been born and, while Lucius would never inflict the disgrace of being divorced and set aside on Cissa - especially in the current political climate where the Black name is all but dead – he had begun to consider other options. Not just a mistress, but a wife _more danico_. Even now, with a son, with his blood and name theoretically secured, he has entertained the notion off and on for years. Ultimately, he sets it aside, too afraid that such an act will push too hard on all the cracks in his life – on the hereditary madness lurking at the edges of Cissa’s eyes, at the respect and affection that exists between them in the place of his parents’ passion and adoration, at the tenuous threads of the Malfoy reputation, or even at the indulgent but often discordant relationship he shares with Draco.

As for Draco? He would see his son happily wed with a wife he respects and admires and a gaggle of children to fill the Manor’s halls with laughter. a wife he _loves_ if Draco is inclined to loving women. He does not know if it would make it easier or harder to find his son a wife if Draco prefers men, both the combination of ritual and potions or surrogacy and blood adoption that would make it possible for him to marry and reproduce with a spouse of his own gender having been outlawed nearly a century and a half ago for being too Dark.

The Parkinsons have begun pressing the idea of a match between Draco and their eldest but Lucius will never agree to it. For one, their reputation is even more tarnished than his own in the wake of the Dark Lord’s death. For another, Pansy is a spoiled child made bitter by being doted on for years and them all but ignored in the last two since her mother successfully carried a much-desired boy to term. The Greengrasses would be a better match, neutral and of suitable status, except for the blood curse that lies upon their daughters. The Abbotts have muddied their line too recently. The Bulstrodes perhaps, except he knows Draco detests the girl. The Bones girl would be marginally acceptable, their ironclad respectability making up for the fact that the most recent generation is still, technically, a half-blood but she is also the last of her line and it always makes for a bad pairing to subsume one house so. No, his best bet will likely to be look further afield. France, perhaps, like his father and so many ancestors before him. Germany. Russia. Spain. Italy. Greece. Maybe even further than that.

Perhaps it does not matter.

Perhaps none of it matters.

Perhaps it is futile to think of his line when their entire world is slipping away from them like water through a sieve.

Perhaps there is nothing that can be done.

Perhaps the end is inevitable.

Perhaps it is already here.

Lucius pauses at the center of the grove. This, here, is the crowning glory of the Malfoy estate - the reason it has flourished and strengthened for so long even as their line falters. A sight that no one but those of Malfoy blood have seen in the last nine hundred years.

The ring of standing stones is not a large one, not compared to nearby Stonehenge or Amesbury. The tallest of them is a scarce six feet in height, ending on level with Lucius’ eyes. The shortest barely comes to his hip. But they thrum with power all the same. They ring with the confluence of the ley lines beneath them and the near millennia of being entwined and fed with Malfoy blood and magic.

At his feet, the peahen pauses, head tipped to the side, sensing.

Animals always know.

They can feel it just as well as he, can hear the buzzing of the magic like bees in his ears and feel it like the brush of nettle against his skin.

Lucius slips the robes from his shoulders and lets it pool, a puddle of cotton, at the base of an oak older than memory. Naked as the day he was born, pale skin pebbling in the frosty morning air, he looks down at the bird. “Come along,” he whispers, barely able to find his voice, and the peahen follows.

If the grove had been still and quiet, inside the stones is absolutely _silent_ to the point that the absence of noise is _loud_, roaring and screaming and drowning out the beat of his heart as it propels blood through his veins. The silence is so loud that he can barely _think_, that he has no choice but to surrender to it as he stands in the center and takes a deep breath.

He can feel it, running through him, the dark and the cold that devours everything. He can feel the weight of it as it pours over his tongue and he holds his arms out in welcome. He can feel the weight of it as he swallows, feel it running down his throat into his stomach, into his veins, can feel it until it pools in his toes, until he’s not sure where he ends and the earth beneath his feet begins.

Some – _most_ – speak their rituals out loud. There is power in words, in the naming of things where others can hear it. Lucius doesn’t. He has never been able to, the rush of the magic as he welcomes it in rendering him blind, deaf, and dumb to anything but his purpose.

Words are powerful. Speaking _is powerful_. But it is not _necessary_.

Not really.

For all the richness and comfort of his everyday life, Lucius has always worked magic best with nothing more than the bare essentials: his body, his mind, his soul, his magic, and the world that he exists in.

He begins at the easternmost stone, the tallest. The cut across his palm is small and easily healed, but it bleeds, crimson and shocking in the gray dawn light and he sets it across the face of the stone. The connection jolts like lightning, the surface of the stone rough and uneven beneath his touch, darkened and marked with the blood of dozens of generations before him. He stands until he can feel nothing but the magic in his veins and in the air around him, like calling to like, until he measures time in nothing but the space between the rise and fall of his chest.

He moves north.

The stone is shorter. He has to crouch to reach it properly, cock and balls dangling just above the frost covered ground as he balances on the balls of his feet. Another cut across his palm, a burst of fresh blood spurting across his skin, a streak of scarlet upon the gray of the stone, the lightning strike of connection. He stays until he is still as stone, until the weight of his bones echoes the solidity of the earth beneath his feet. Until he is naught but wind and rock.

He moves west.

Another cut, another rush of warmth across chilled skin, the sing of electricity particularly strong as he lays his palm across the stone. He can hear the crackle of it. He breathes until he is nothing but the blood flowing in his veins, warm and fluid and swirling around and around and around inside his mortal frame.

He moves south.

A fourth cut, a final cut, his skin splitting once again beneath the force of his will, of his _intent_. He crouches again, wraps his hand around the frost covered greenery growing at the base of the stone and rips it upward. It comes with little effort: a mixture of grass and twigs and fallen leaves, cold and damp against his skin, stinging where it presses into his wounds and mingles with his blood. He stares at his hand, at the frost covered bouquet that he holds, and inhales, focusing.

_One. Two. Three. Four._

On the fourth beat of his heart the bouquet bends to his will and bursts into flame, the fire roaring into existence as if he has doused the whole thing in alcohol. He can feel the heat of it against his hand but he doesn’t let go. Instead, he stares at it as the flames climb higher, flickering orange and red, hints of purple and even blue licking around his skin. When it is more than half gone, he presses his hand, torch and all, to the stone.

The familiar electrical jump of connection is all but lost in the rush of the circle being complete. He feels it like a cage, like walls, slamming down around him and cutting him off from everything else. From everything that is not already in here with him.

His body, his mind, his soul, his magic, and the bit of the world around him.

And the young peahen.

She has followed him faithfully around the circle, detouring occasionally to peck at bugs and twigs, but ultimately trailing after him with all of the devotion of a well-trained dog. She follows him now, back towards the center of the standing stone, to the additional shelf of rock that sits upon the surface of the earth, separate from the circle itself and barely coming to his shins. It is smoother than the standing stones themselves, the edges and uneven waves of it long since worn off by the brush of human hands.

Lucius kneels in the dirt, feels the cold of it, feels how it seems almost hot against his skin, seeping up through his knees. The makeshift torch, nearly burnt out, is spread across its surface: fire and ash and blood, the last wisps of smoke curling up into his face and tickling at his eyes.

The peahen pushes forward, chirping and squawking: curious and demanding as ever and distantly he thinks he might smile at it, the tug of the muscles controlling his lips so far beyond his current understanding that it’s more an abstract idea than a concrete observation. He gathers her into his arms and strokes the soft plume of feathers rising from her head, draws his hand down her neck and back with practiced ease, leaves the shimmer of his blood against the white of her feathers. She quiets and settles in the curve of his hand, settling into his hold as she has every day since the day she was born, since he had watched her break from her shell and scooped her up in his palm. Since he had touched his blood and magic to the still damp feathers of her head, marking her for this moment.

It is not a blade, not a knife, nothing forged or made that he takes from the natural niche on the side of the altar stone. It is a flake of rock, part of the standing stones themselves that had fallen to the ground in a time beyond memory and lain there until Armand had picked it up over nine hundred years ago and curled his hand around it, felt the way it settled against his palm and sang. Just like the stones themselves.

Dozens of hands, perhaps even hundreds have held it like he does, have used it like he will. After all these centuries it is worn smooth and perfect on three sides, fitted precisely to the Malfoy hand and no one else. The final side is honed: sharp and perfect, sharper than any blade – ritual or otherwise – that sits in the Manor or the Lodge.

So sharp that the peahen never realizes what is happening.

There is no fight, no fear, no struggle to get away. She does not know that death is coming for her until she is already dead, until the sharp of the stone has bitten deeply into the hollow where her throat connects to her skull, slipping through skin and muscle as if they were not even there, and opening her up from throat to tail. There’s an initial spurt, a splatter of blood across altar and ground but the bulk of it spills out in a cascade, crimson and hot, down his arms and across his thighs. Not even the scent of blood is enough to alarm her, lulled by the presence of his own, by the curl of his hand holding her to his chest. She only flinches once he has opened her completely up and he’s not sure, he’s never sure, if it is a last panicked attempt to get away because something is _not right _or if it is merely a reaction, a reflex to viscera abruptly loosed from its prison: a bounce to counteract the drag.

At the flinch he leans forward. Entrails and organs spill across the altar in a brief gush of blood, the steaming damp innards extinguishing the last of the flame with a hiss and the brief smell of cooking meat: there and gone in a moment before it is covered by the more metallic, fetid scent of everything else.

Lucius lowers his arms and relaxes his grip. The still warm corpse rolls down his body and across his thighs, white feathers dragging through trails of blood before gently coming to rest on the bit of ground between his knees and the stone. He follows and all but topples forward, catching himself with hands curled around the edge of the altar, face and chest hovering over entrails and organs steaming in the chill of the morning.

And he stares.

He stares and he stares and he stares.

He stares unseeing and yet observant, tracing the curl of an intestine with his eyes and then his hands, the heart nestled with the lungs, the peak of the liver from underneath it all.

He is there-but-not-there, his senses fogged and heavy but cold and clarifying and sharp. He is cold, so cold, the chill rising up in his chest and spreading out through his limbs until he’s heavy with it, until the world is dark but for the warmth of innards beneath his fingers.

Everything stained red.

It is rotten. Decayed.

He is surprised-but-not-surprised.

He seeks a glance at the upcoming year, a peek beyond the veil of death to the omniscience that exists in the darkness.

Tonight he will celebrate his dead, he will make offerings and remember but this morning he seeks to know. To know what is coming. To know what is happening.

To know how much longer they have left.

The sacrifice has shown decay for over a decade, a slinking rot that creeps and grows unnoticed.

This is worse than it has ever been.

The peahen had been curious and happy, affectionate even, and gleeful in her hunt for bugs and grains. Her eyes had been bright, her feathers had gleamed with health but here, inside, she is rotten. She is already dead but unknowing.

But what glimpse does this give him? Is it of himself? His family? The wizarding world?

All of it, perhaps, or none of it.

And then he finds it.

There, nestled beneath everything else, hidden by the rot. No more than a handful but there all the same. They are a deep yellow, almost orange, miraculous unbroken beneath the weight of viscera, their surface delicately webbed in a lace of blood vessels.

Eggs.

Unlaid eggs.

It should not be possible.

Even the quickly maturing peahens do not reach sexual maturity until a year of age – or later. The sacrifice is too young, scarcely half a year old, and yet here they are. Unlaid eggs.

_Healthy_, unlaid eggs, unharmed by the illness around them.

Unrealizing, he reaches out and presses two fingers to the largest one until it bursts beneath his touch, coating blood stained fingers in rich yolk. It is smooth against his lips, like satin, buttery and warm in his mouth, underscored with the iron and salt of spilled blood.

He licks his fingers clean and his mind finally goes still.

To his right the sun suddenly bursts over the horizon, the shaft of golden light like a knife, severing his connection and releasing him from the darkness, driving away the cold with its warmth.

Bereft, he is left empty and shivering on the cold ground.

Unsure.

The walk back to the manor both takes forever and happens instantaneously. The soft cotton of his robe is too rough against his skin, pulling and scraping at half dried blood until it itches.

Cissa is waiting for him on the back patio: standing straight and tall, elegant and refined in slim black robes that make her hair gleam like spun gold. He stops in front of her, just enough space between them to ensure that the tacky blood on his body does not dirty her clothes. Hands gentle, if red and brown with blood, he tips her face upwards and kisses her deep and slow. If she is confused by the taste of yolk and blood in his mouth she doesn’t say, doesn’t flinch away. She kisses him back and he feels it searing him, a baptism by fire.

“Is everything alright?” she asks when they part and just the fact that she asks tells Lucius that all of his tumultuous thoughts and eerie calm are written all over his face for anyone to read.

“I don’t know,” he finally whispers, taking her hands, pale and clean with his own. “I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long and not really necessary to read author's note that is pretty much a very, very simplified dumping ground for history notes and various Malfoy headcanons. I should really probably make a separate "fic" to start dumping all this information in. (It's on my to do list?)
> 
> 1) The Conqueror and the Bastard both refer to William the Conqueror, a Duke of Normandy who crossed to England and became the first Norman King of England in 1066 after he defeated Harold Godwinson (the current king) at the Battle of Hastings. Armand Malfoy coming to England with William the Conqueror is canon but I have taken gleeful joy in expanding upon that. Historical accounts differ on the exact manner of Harold's death - there are some records that indicate that he met the Duke of Normandy on the field of battle and was killed by him (possibly with the help of several of the duke's companions) and likely dismembered but most depict him being felled by an arrow (particularly in grand dramatic fashion with an arrow through the eye). I've decided that if I'm adding a wizard into the mix that a wand to the head could totally be confused for an arrow by a muggle and that the duke gets his sword in there as well.
> 
> 2) Lucius' consideration of taking a wife _more danico_ (translation, "in the Danish manner") is reference to the medieval practice of taking a spouse "secularly" - that is, the marriage was generally considered valid and legal but was done without the oversight and/or permission of the Church. In the eyes of a clergy the wife in said arrangement would have been considered a mistress. Occasionally, it seems to have been used as a way to smooth over bride stealing or elopement. This type of marriage allowed for the practice of polygyny and we can even circle back to our good friend Harold Godwinson as an example who was married to his first wife _more danico_ and had six children with her before he also married the widow of the Welsh Prince in 1066 under the sanction of the Church. I imagine that a "common law marriage" is probably (maybe?) our closest modern equivalent.  
Lucius considers this outdated tactic as perhaps the only answer that would allow him to not socially disgrace Narcissa while giving this other woman the respect she deserves as the mother of his children, and attempting to avoid the potential pitfalls of having a "bastard" as an heir, should something happen to Draco and that become necessary. Ultimately, he never goes through with this plan. 
> 
> 3) I can't remember how Malfoy Manor is portrayed in the movies (it's been a few years) but I have always imagined it to look exactly like [ the Belton House ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belton_House#Interior_and_contents).  
Now known as "The Lodge", the original Malfoy House built by/for Armand exhibits a similar architectural style to [ Oakham Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakham_Castle%22) and [ Saltford Manor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltford_Manor_House). It still exists on the other side of the estate from the Manor and has been used by various Malfoys and important guests since the Manor's completion. Voldemort lived there off and on for several years in the late 60s and early 70s. He takes the Manor as headquarters following his original '95 resurrection due to its significantly larger size and its ability to house all of his formerly imprisoned Death Eaters.
> 
> 4) I hc that Malfoys traditionally acquire a second, custom wand (their "real" wand) once they are adults that utilizes wood from one of the numerous wand trees that exist in their grove. The Malfoy Lord also wields the wand Armand had crafted for himself that has been cared for and passed down for centuries. The "mainstream" wands that they acquired to learn with are retired and kept as a backup. In canon, Lucius gives his wand (elm) to Voldemort. Wiki tells me that it is supposed to be the hereditary Malfoy wand but I call BS because there is no way that someone as devoted and obsessed with his family as Lucius would let that wand out of Malfoy hands. IMO, he likely hid the hereditary wand in a safe place - likely soon after Voldemort returned - and instead surrendered his own wand to the Dark Lord. 
> 
> 5) I couldn't resist the opportunity to flesh out the beginnings of the feud between the Malfoys and the Weasleys. I've just never bought that some dislike and the desire to slip the diary to Ginny being enough to provoke him into an all out muggle style brawl in a public place. Also I kind of hate that "blood traitor" only ever means "not a blood supremacist". I just always wanted there to be _more_ to it than that.
> 
> 5) While I do absolutely love Jason Isaacs as Lucius my own mental picture of him looks much closer to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (aka: Jaime Lannister from GoT but with much paler hair) so if I'm fancasting this thing, he's my pick.


	10. Just Enough to Damn Him (Snape)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place simultaneously with parts of chapters 13, 14, and 15 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show" and can be read at any point after chapter 13. 
> 
> Brief TW for blink and you miss it suicidal thoughts and a memory of attempted suicide.

“…Thought you ought to know.”

Severus watches Quirrell’s slow and comical topple with distaste, the majority of the student body – even some of his snakes, he’s displeased to note – erupting into hysterics and chaos like common miscreants with the pathetic thump of the man’s body onto the wide stone steps. He wants to catch Dumbledore’s eye, wants to give the man a scathing, silent, _I told you so_ but the headmaster is already on his feet shouting for silence and directing the snotty nosed imbeciles back to the safety of their common rooms.

He barely manages not to roll his eyes.

The Slytherin Rooms are _in _the dungeon, of course, not that the old man deigns to remember or care but at least the facsimile of worry on behalf of a quarter of the student body would be appreciated.

No matter.

It’s not as if a single troll poses any chance of getting in there with his students. It would take a team of curse breakers and ward masters at least a day to pick through all the layers of protections he and the castle have woven around Slytherin house in the past decade. That, or far more brute strength than even a dozen trolls could bring to bear. It’s the getting them there that will be the issue.

Well, one of the issues.

Forgotten in the chaos, the pathetic turbaned cretin is beginning to make his escape.

_Don’t worry,_ _he said_, Severus growls inwardly. _It will be well protected_, _he said_. _No one will try to take it, my boy_. He is going to fucking skin the old man. Possibly before or after strangling the sanctimonious bastard with his own beard.

“Fawley, Travers, gather the first years. Avery, Jugson, get the second years,” he orders as he sweeps up to his prefects. “Talbot, direct the rest of the house out into the entrance hall. I’m going to open a professor’s passage that ends by my office. The wards will let you through. Get to your dorms and stay there. Soren, with me.”

“Yes, sir,” his seventh-year female prefect peels off and falls into line behind him as strides from the great hall. The entrance to the passageway is behind a tapestry just off the entrance hall, a door that will only open at the command of someone actually contracted and employed by the school. And even then, he doesn’t think they’ve bothered to show most of the DADA professors of the past decade or two. Why bother to expose the castle’s secrets to someone who likely won’t even last the year?

“Here.” Severus opens the passage with a slash of his wand. “This one leads straight down to the dungeons and comes out just down from my office behind that painting of a kraken. Make sure everyone gets into the dorms and _stays there_. Call for some house elves to bring in some food. I’ll be back to check on everyone by curfew.” If he’s not done with things by the time curfew rolls around then he’s probably dead.

“Yes sir,” she says again. “I’ll make sure everything is taken care of.”

Thank _Salazar_ for a fucking competent student. He might actually cry when she graduates this year.

Spinning on his heel, Severus turns and heads down the hall, completely ignoring the main staircase. It might be the most obvious route upwards but he knows the castle better than anybody – even Albus. He’s been slinking through its corridors and hiding in its secret passageways since was eleven years old. The only people who possibly knew it better are all dead or rotting in Azkaban. The main staircase likes to move more than any other staircase in the castle and he could probably make it be still even though he is out of his jurisdiction – away from his classroom and his house. The castle likes him. Always has. – but even then, he would come up nearly on the opposite end of the castle from where he wants to be. But if he goes down this side corridor here, past the set of stairs that leads down to the first floor and lets out by the kitchen, and takes this turn here there’s a secondary staircase around this corner. One that barely moves but when it does…

He feels the castle responding beneath his touch to the banister, a sluggish stirring, like watching the giant squid rise up from the depths. The stairs creak and shift, swinging beneath him, arching away from the wall and across one of the inner turrets and it deposits him right in front of the locked corridor.

Except it isn’t locked.

An intricate flick of his wand confirms what the cool shift of magic in his veins already tells him: there’s no warding present, no locking or repelling charms. Nothing.

Which means that Quirrell is already _in there…_

Or, his mind supplies unhelpfully, it means that Albus never warded it to begin with.

Which, given his suspicions about the whole thing being a trap for whatever remains of the Dark Lord or perhaps a test for Harry – for _Lily’s son_ – isn’t as farfetched an idea as he would like it to be.

Still, to leave one of the most powerful magical artifacts in existence lying out in the open with nothing but a series of half-hearted obstacles between it and potential thieves…

Severus is going to kill him.

He is going to hold the old fool down and choke him to death with his own lemon drops.

Right after he gets his hands on Quirrell and, to borrow a charming turn of phrase from Tobias, puts the fear of God into his miserable hide.

He slips into the room, crouched low as he goes through the door with a twist that brings him up outside of the obvious line of spell fire.

Nothing.

The room is dim, lit only by a handful of enchanted candles on the far side and there is a Cerberus right in his face.

Of course. Of course, there is.

He’s never had much luck. Just enough to damn him.

“Fuck,” he mutters and dives back towards the door.

The dog lunges and Severus twists, avoiding one head and knocking a second one back with an overpowered stinging hex straight to the eyes. It’s the third head that gets him, teeth clamping down on the meat of his calf as he yanks at the door. The pain is unbelievable, almost cruciatus like in its intensity but duller and, frankly, that scares him more because that means the beast has really dug in. Teeth clenched to keep from screaming he slams his elbow downward into the ridge above the beast’s eye and it jerks in surprise at the attack.

Something tears in his leg: a wet, meaty sort of noise.

Severus slashes at the dog’s face and this time it leaps back, yelping as lines bloom across its face, blood dripping into its eyes and down to patter on the floor and Severus doesn’t bother to stick around to see how much damage he does – doesn’t bother to wait to observe how quickly the Cerberus will heal. Instead, he stumbles out of the door, drops to one knee and swears some more as he fumbles for his wand.

His leg looks awful, trousers torn and bloodied, the shredded flesh beneath it throbbing in time with his heart. “_Episkey_.” The spell is woefully underpowered for this type of wound – both in relation to severity and cause - but anything that would _actually_ help will either take too long or is not something he wants to do out in the middle of the corridor. Beneath the tip of his wand his flesh gives a valiant effort at responding, strands of muscle and chunks of flesh trying to cleave back to their origin. “_Ferula_.”

The bloody dog hadn’t broken any bones but it’s clear that his leg doesn’t believe that, the sloppily put back together tendons screaming at him as they’re forced to straighten out.

“Fuck,” he says again and scrambles for one of the pain potions he keeps in his pocket.

Well, the good news is that he is pretty damn sure that Quirrell hadn’t beaten him here. The younger man has a bit of a knack with creatures – especially dark creatures – but Severus thinks there would be a lot more evidence of the man’s presence if he’d been in that room – successfully or not.

Bad news, his leg is torn to hell and he’s going to go down in history as the man who finally snaps and murders Albus Dumbledore in a fit of rage.

Good news, Lucius will give him a disgustingly lavish funeral for that fact alone.

Taking a slow, deep breath he leans into his occlumency and lets the icy cold consume him. The cold of occlumency is different than the chill of the smoke and shadow that lives in the hollow of his chest and hums in his veins. Dark Magic is cool, brisk and dark and endless but occlumency is empty, a detached and unfeeling numbness.

Exactly what he needs.

Another deep breath and he leverages himself back to his feet. Distantly, he knows that it probably feels like someone has set fiendfyre on his leg but between the potion and his impeccable mental shields the screaming and pulling in his leg as he moves is nothing more than a vague observation to be stored for a more appropriate time. Rolling his shoulders, he lets the length of his robes swirl around his legs, artfully hiding the damage and…

“Severus?”

The entirety of his being snaps to attention. His wand is up, held low and just off his center of gravity, loose and ready in his fingers to slash or spin as he turns to face the corridor that leads from the main staircase. “Quirinus,” he drawls. “Whatever brings you here?” He’s taller than the younger man – a fact that he uses to his advantage, casually straightening to his full height and turning into the other professor’s space.

Such an act is usually enough to make the turban wearing idiot flinch but not today. Today he stands in Severus’ shadow and stares back, eyes sharp and calculating and for just a moment, just a brief, infinitesimal part of a second Severus thinks he sees…

“I th-th-thought I sh-sh-should ch-check the-the-the t-troll,” he stammers, snapping away from Severus’ presence like it burns him. “S-see if it g-g-got loo-loose or if-if there are t-t-two of them.”

“Of course,” Severus agrees after a beat of silence that should convey that he doesn’t believe the mewling little worm in the slightest. “You do have a knack for trolls,” he adds with a pointed sharpness that sends the other man stumbling back another step. “But everything is as it should be. Here.” Behind his back he twitches his fingers at the door, a simple locking charm settling into place. It won’t hold against anybody with a wand but it’s better than _nothing_. “We should check the lower levels. My students are quite concerned with the idea of a troll blundering about near their home.”

“Of-of-of c-c-c-course,” Quirrell nods frantically, the loose edge of his turban flailing about his shoulder like some sort of rubber snake. Severus takes a step forward. Quirrell takes a step back. They repeat this several times before Severus deigns to raise an eyebrow – the only warning he will deign to give that the man is about to run back first into a suit of armor – and Quirrell promptly turns an ugly, mottled shade of red and white – as if he can’t decide whether to be angry or afraid – and spends more than a minute trying to get a single _sorry _to fall from his lips.

Severus feels his mouth curl back in a snarl.

Imbecile.

The fact that _Quirrell_, of all the idiots in this place is the one to break and try for the veritable fountain of youth is not exactly a surprise. His colleagues might collectively be narrow minded fools but they all possess rather strong wills and are caged in by their rigid stances on the ideas of _right _and _wrong_. In fact, he’s quite sure that the lack of such rigidity makes _Severus_ the weak link in the eyes of his fellow professors. Which just shows how little they know him despite living with him for five, ten, fifteen, even _twenty_ years.

Severus doesn’t want to live forever. He still has days where he doesn’t even want to live as far as _lunch_. Days when the idea of letting the Weasley twins’ latest experiment just shove him straight off this mortal coil sounds so appealing that he has to force himself to sit behind his desk and supervise from there.

Though it’s been better, recently. Having Harry, having _Lily’s son_ – this child who stares back at him with this odd combination of his childhood friend and enemy stamped across his face but beneath that, beneath it all, the boy reminds him so much of _himself_ that it takes his breath away if he dares think about it so he _doesn’t_ because apparently there is an end to his self-flagellation – here in the castle with him helps. It _helps_, soothing away at something torn and bleeding inside of him to see that green gaze turned on him and filled not with disappointment or disgust but understanding and respect.

It catches him off guard.

Every. Single. Day.

He escorts Quirrell back down to the second floor, the younger man apparently deciding that silence and compliance is his smartest course of action right now. It is, of course, but Severus certainly isn’t going to tell him that. He’s going to let the incompetent little twit sweat a little.

They run into Aurora and Septima at the base of the steps, the pair having obviously just come up from the floor below. “First floor is clear,” Aurora tells him. “Dumbledore and Flitwick are still searching the dungeons. McGonagall was going to join them after she got her lions upstairs.”

“It didn’t make its way to the upper floors,” Severus tells them and he thinks, vaguely, that he should probably be paying attention to what she is saying or to the man by his side who is suddenly standing up straighter, something sharper curling around his edges but his attention has been snagged by the two students still standing on the other side of the Entrance Hall – most notably by the impossible shock of platinum hair. “You should join the Headmaster. Take Quirrell,” he adds as an afterthought. “He has a knack with trolls.”

Aurora might say something – or maybe it’s Septima this time – but he ignores it, pushing aside the mindless babble of agreement and filing the way Quirrell watches him go out of the corner of his eyes away for later contemplation. Right now, he pushes away everything except for the fact that his godson is still standing in the middle of the Entrance Hall instead of being safely ensconced in his dorm.

“What,” he snaps as soon as he is close enough to not shout, “are you still doing up here?” He’s angry. He can feel the way it vibrates in his chest and knows that with the occlumency still down between him and his feelings that it doesn’t just sound disappointed and upset but _harsh_.

“Waiting, sir,” Travers is quick to reply from behind Draco but his godson all but lunges for him.

“Harry’s missing!”

The entire world grounds to a halt.

“_What_?”

He’s past anger now, past furious and well on his way to _seething_ and there’s a part of him bitterly shouting, _Thoughtless, reckless boy – just like his father! _But it feels like someone has opened him up, has pried his ribs back so that he gleams bone white and crimson in the firelight as they reach down and clench their fist around his heart.

_Not Harry_, it beats.

“He went to tell McGonagall that Granger has refused to come out of the loo,” his godson clarifies and the boy’s mind is familiar enough to him that he can catch the odd sort of sense behind these nonsensical words: a vague sense of frustration and hurt and hiding, “but he never came out of the Great Hall.”

He has. Wherever Harry Potter might be now, it certainly isn’t in the Great Hall.

“Would he have gone after Granger himself?” Snape asks but that’s a stupid question. Of course, Potter would go running off in a time of danger, completely unconcerned about what his actions might mean to others.

Severus growls and gives himself a mental shake, shoving all thoughts of _Potter _back into the box where they belong.

“I don’t think so…” Draco tells him but the boy’s brow is furrowed worryingly. “He’s not really like that. But he was scared that she would be left there.”

“_Where_?”

“The girls’ loo just down there.” Draco points down the corridor Severus himself had raced down not even a quarter of an hour earlier.

“Go the dorm, Draco,” he orders. “I mean it.” And that’s all he can spare for his godson right now, all he can give him without cracking open his mental shields and he doesn’t have time for feeling. If he feels, he’s crippled, in more ways than one. And he needs to _move_.

He doesn’t run but it’s a close thing. There’s an urgency beating in his heart, hammering and jumping like a frightened rabbit, the hawk’s talons already curled through its flesh. Unknowingly already dead. It’s not just him. He can feel it in the castle beneath his feet, feel the way the magic in the stones _shakes_ like it’s about to cave in and the last time he felt it this distressed Mary Malcom had just tried to open her veins off in some remote corner of the dungeons and he’d barely managed to get to her in time to clamp his hands around her wrists and keep her from bleeding out onto the cold, hard stone.

He rounds the corner leading to the stairs and is hit in the face with a wall of dark magic so pure and unmuddied that for a moment he can taste it. The sensation of hoarfrost and gently falling snow curls across his tongue and leaves him lost in a world of moonless night. One that extends forever between snow and starlight and on and on and on past the beginning and ending of both.

“Fuck,” he says and he can’t breathe, can’t get his lungs to work in the face of the expanse.

Now, he runs.

At first, he can’t make sense of it. The presence of so much magic in the air blurring what his eyes and ears try to tell him. But then, suddenly, it all comes together.

The bathroom is a wreck. Utterly destroyed. Stone and tiles ripped from the walls, an entire line of sinks reduced into porcelain dust and inches of water pooling on the floor. The troll is there too, or what remains of it. It too has been shattered, just like the sinks. The bulk of its body is little more than broken glass across the floor, great jagged junks of meat made into crystal. Its legs though, its legs are still upright, rising up from the floor like a jagged mockery of the turrets hugging the castle’s walls, the edges oddly blackened. And there is screaming. Granger is on the far side of the room crouched at the base of the wall with her hands clasped desperately over that untamable mane of hair screaming as if she were dying. No. Screaming as if she _wished _she were dying. As if it is all simply too much to endure.

And there, oh, Salazar, there on the floor, face down in inches of half frozen water is _Lily’s son_.

“Harry!” the cry leaves his throat before he can stop it and he has his wand out, flicking through the motions of diagnostic charms over the boy’s still – too still, Merlin, _no_ – form.

The sight of his heart beating in the diagnostics might be the most welcome sight of his miserable fucking life. There’s nothing wrong with Harry, not really. Still a little underfed but stronger, so much stronger, than when he arrived at the school two months ago but chasing on the heels of his elation is a tarrying dread because while the boy’s physical health might be okay his magic is simply… not there.

No. That’s not right.

Severus reaches out as he so very rarely lets himself, his magic moving down and out like a snake: back and forth in a sinuous stretch as it passes by: silent and deadly. Let’s himself chase after the spark that is Harry Potter, the shine and the shadow that hits his senses like an imploding star. Except there’s nothing there. Not like there’s supposed to be anyway. There’s nothing there but a small glimmer there in the depths, a shard of glass catching the reflection of the light instead of a blazing inferno.

_No. No. No._

The child lives but whatever he has done has pushed his magic almost beyond its ability, the spark of burned low and reduced to few smoldering coals buried under tons of ash and that terrifies Severus more than the slow beat of the boy’s heart. One can survive burning themselves out, can survive channeling so much magic that they turn themselves into a squib. Technically. But most don’t. And if they do, what sort of life is left for them? Magic but not magic? In a world but not of it but knowing, always knowing, how it tastes and sings and feels in your veins?

“Harry!” his godson’s voice cracks in the middle, the terror so thick that he can taste it. He wants to yell at Draco, wants to scream, wants to shake the very life out of him for _not listening_ but instead he swirls his wand and siphons the water away from Harry’s head, away from the mouth and nose half covered by the growing depths.

“You stupid boy,” he murmurs under his breath and the words hurt and claw in the ruin of his chest. He doesn’t know if he is talking to Harry or Draco. Or both. “Go fetch the Headmaster! Get Pomfrey!” Draco hesitates, frozen at the threshold of the room. “_GO!_” Severus roars.

The water is cold beneath the one knee he dares to bend. So cold. Cold like occlumency shields, numbing and sharp. “You stupid child,” he breathes. He looks so small like this. So fucking small and it breaks something in Severus, some dam he didn’t know existed and he knows without the occlumency he’d be drowning. He’d be loss in his grief and his pain and the desperate wails of a frightened child.

The memories are too close today.

“P’fessor,” Harry’s voice is slurred and barely discernible. It’s almost easier to tell that he’s speaking by the ripples in the surface of the water beneath his mouth than in the actual sound and shape of the words.

“Shh,” Severus finds himself whispering. “Save your strength. We’re just waiting for someone to help me stabilize you so that we can get you to the Hospital Wing. We don’t want to shock your system. Your magic is dangerously low and you could…” he’s babbling. He’s babbling like he hasn’t done since he was a teen, since he begged and begged and _begged _for forgiveness. He’s babbling like he hasn’t done since the last time he got on his knees for the Dark Lord, like he hasn’t since he abased himself at Albus’ feet and sold him whatever pieces of Severus remained.

“You’re…still…bleeding.”

He is, yes. The blood trickling in a small if steady stream out from underneath sodden bandages. “It’s nothing,” he tells the boy. “I’ve certainly had worse.” True. “It’ll just take a spot of dittany and a blood replenisher and I’ll be good as new.” False, but not overly so. The Cerberus is certainly a dark creature and injuries caused by dark creatures are tricky, slow healing things almost as magic resistant as the beasts that make them.

“Make it stop.” The words are raw and pleading and Severus can feel tears burning at his eyes.

“I will,” he promises lowly. “But I need you to hold still.” He’s petrified inside. He has his magic on the pulse of Harry’s own and it’s so faint, Merlin, it’s so fucking faint. He’s all but cradling what is left of the boy’s core with his magic, trying to keep his body from realizing how much of it is gone. “Harry…”

The boy’s fingertips are like brands against his leg, burning through the remains of his trousers and down, down through his skin and muscle and bone.

“_Not again_.”

He feels the words hit the air like a physical force, can feel the intent behind it – the shape of the boy’s indominable will as it looms over him.

He feels the exact moment that the coals flicker, the moment that the little piece of glass reflecting back the light just _shatters_.

And then suddenly a fire is burning where there had been none just moments before, except it’s not fire, no. It’s the wind across the moor, it’s a tsunami crashing down over his head and ice shooting up his leg. It’s starlight and driven snow and a never-ending expanse of nothingness driving up and up and _up _into him and he doesn’t have to wonder what happened to the troll, he doesn’t have to guess what the boy did. He froze it. He literally froze it. Filled it up with so much darkness that it turned to ice. Poured so much of the abyss into its flesh that the life was stolen from the creature’s veins and its remnants made more fragile that thinly spun glass.

And that could happen to him – is _going to _happen to him if he doesn’t push back.

So he does.

_Here I am_, he says. _I am like but different. We are one but apart. We hold the Void in our hearts and we set it free_.

He reaches out with the smoke that tingles in his veins, that pools around him in great ropes and slithering bodies and shoves it back in, lets it swallow all of that power crashing over him and flow through him, flow out of him, looping back into Harry and into him and into Harry and into him and…

He’s not going to stop.

Harry is not going to stop.

The boy is pulling on magic that isn’t even _there_. Forget turning himself into a squib he’s going to literally burn himself from the inside out. The poor conductor of his young flesh not meant for feats such as this.

He doesn’t have time.

He runs.

He runs.

He runs.

_He runs._

Down the corridor, up the stairs, up again, one more time. Take that passage there, slip behind the tapestry. Out again behind the portrait of Joan of Arc.

“Severus!” the boom of the Headmaster’s voice is deafening and he feels it more than hears it. Feels it vibrating through stone and beam.

“Troll,” Severus manages to bite out because Albus doesn’t know. He won’t understand. “Magical. Exhaustion.”

But it’s not. It’s not anymore. It had been magical exhaustion and now it is something else, something larger and more terrifying.

He’s never seen someone hemorrhage magic like this.

Never felt it.

Didn’t know it was even _possible_.

It’s like he’s channeling straight from the Void, from the endless fount of Darkness itself and there’s not enough of Harry to match it. It’s tearing him apart. He’s lost in the dark but he is the dark and how does one find their way back from that?

“Severus?” Poppy’s voice is music in his ears, the rolling of tolling bells. “Headmaster? What is… _Is that Mr. Potter?_” He can tell the moment she identifies the body in his arms because the screech of her voice climbs to the rafters and the castle groans with it, creaking and moaning.

“Poppy dear, there seems to have been an incident,” Albus is saying and, as if the stupid, bloody boy had heard the old man and taken the whole thing as a challenge, Harry’s body – his tiny, fragile body – finally takes notice of what is happening to it.

Fuck.

Suddenly the loop of magic - the ebb and flow of it has left Severus raw and shaking as he channels for the both of them - suddenly it’s not enough.

It’s not even close to enough.

“Don’t you dare,” he breathes into Harry’s hair as his heartbeat falters, skips beneath the brush of his fingers against the child’s neck. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

But he’s a Potter, loathe as Severus is to remember, and he dares. Out of spite, most likely. Just like his father.

The coals flicker. They fade, the edges go white with ash.

Beneath the touch of his fingertips Harry Potter’s heart stutters.

Stops.

If hadn’t been occluding so hard he can feel it in his teeth he might have shouted at the sudden stillness, he might have dropped to his knees and _screamed _as he had not cried since he held Lily, still warm but so still, so fucking still, in his arms and wept because she was gone. As gone as one can be, dissipated in the dark and the cold and lost forever.

But he is still occluding and even though he knows he is consumed, knows that the magic and the emotions are eating him alive, he can still _think_.

He can still remember.

Remember how, once upon a time, he had watched as the Dark Lord had…

He can still think _maybe_ from the other side of the glass.

Severus throws Harry onto the nearest bed and begins to summon items from his pockets. There’s no ritual for this, not really. He’s operating on instinct and terror and the shadow of a memory. But that’s all the best magic is in the end. Nothing but instinct and intent and direction.

Poppy and Albus are both shouting at him. Different things, he thinks, but he has no attention to spare for them as he rips open Harry’s shirt and begins to pile pinches of this and that on his chest.

Pine, of course. And nettle.

Dong quai and mullein and tansy.

Mugwort and wormwood but only a pinch and _only_ together.

Labradorite and selenite and obsidian and amber.

It’s a lot. It’s so much more than he usually uses. But he’s desperate and he has no room for error and…

The stone knife is small, barely the length of his pinky and the sharp edges bite into his fingers as he grips it and draws a line across one palm. He holds it in his teeth to make a line across his other palm and spits it out when he is done, ribbons of red welling up from tender flesh and sliding across his hands.

“Severus! Severus!”

“Yell at me later,” he manages to snap at the bearded face. Then he takes a deep breath and shoves everything away.

It’s gone, all of it.

It’s just him here. Just Severus Snape broken down to his basest layers. The ripple and slide of his magic and the hum of his own core and the smoke and the snow and the emptiness beyond the starlight that have lived in him since he was a child, since he was a babe barely able to walk and sitting on his mother’s knee while she pinched the herbs together and lit the candles. Just him, stones of many colors: quartz and amethyst and oh, so many more clutched in his chubby little fists and laying them out in the moonlight. Just him, her hand over his as she buried iron beneath their threshold and hung rosemary in their doorways. Just him, barely able to speak and feeling the breathless brush of cold in his lungs as she anointed his forehead and cheeks with her own blood and leapt with him over the fire built in the back garden.

Just him and the faint, flickering smudge of a dying star that is Harry Potter.

In his heart Severus feels something stir, something feral and vicious and all consuming. A monster he hasn’t fed in a decade and he can’t stop the growl that falls from his lips, the rumble that rises up from his chest and erupts out of his mouth. Lily is gone. _Gone_. And he has held her in his arms and felt it, felt the absence of her, felt the lack of light and warmth inside of her. He has held her still warm corpse and felt nothing for the babe in the crib behind him save the brush of bitterness that the child lived but his mother did not and the vague note that at least the child might understand the storm that had ripped him apart.

In another life, the guilt of his failure in that moment might have driven him to do many things, terrible things, in an attempt to buy forgiveness. But in this life her son, _Lily’s son_, is here beneath him. Leaving, fading, _dying_ and he can’t take it. He can’t allow it. All that matters is bringing the boy _back_. In catching him before he is dead. In grabbing him before he is beyond Severus’ reach.

With a roar Severus slams his hands down on the boy’s chest and the force of it alone is enough to jolt the stunned muscle in his chest, enough to make it beat faster.

But it’s not enough. It won’t be enough.

So Severus throws himself in after it.

It feels like falling downward and outward at the same time as he follows the faint threads that connect them. The memory of that terrible night. The oath that Albus made him swear – nothing so absolute as an unbreakable vow but ironclad all the same. The bond between Head of House and student. They are whisper thin strands but they’re _there_ and Snape follows them down and out and up and in and he pulls the magic with him, projects it with his own until the dying ember of Harry is looped in coil after coil.

Until he feels nothing but the shift of the magic, of all the threads pulling together. Until the roar turns into something else as what he offers is torn out of him, a wordless song that follows him into the darkness.

Until he holds the ember against him and doesn’t just loop the magic through them but feeds it, plies it with the harnessed magic and with bits and pieces torn from his own core and offered like morsels to a baby bird.

_Please_, he begs of the darkness in which they float.

_Please_.

He has never had much luck. Just enough to damn him.

That’s all he needs now.

Once he had watched the Dark Lord tear the magical core out of a sacrifice and hold it like a tangible thing.

And he knows, he knows he doesn’t have the strength to achieve that. Nor the time or even the ritual to replicate it. He certainly doesn’t have the desire.

What he has is a desire to save Harry, to keep this boy, this child, this budding supernova _here_.

_Please_.

He feels something tear: a rip and a tug and heat licking up his throat.

In his hands the ember sparks and bursts into flame and he feels it. Severus feels it like a shockwave all the way down to his bones, down to the very particles of stardust that are held together in the form of him.

Beneath his hands, slippery and stinging, the boy gasps – chest heaving with the sudden influx of air and with the air Severus can feel the flame take hold, can feel the flames – flames that are flames but burn cold, the sort of cold that sits in your lungs and eases up the back of your neck – take off and spread. And with the rush of fire he can feel the slip of a boy settling beneath his touch.

“A’right ‘fessor,” the slurred words are soft and tinny, barely more than a whistle of air between Harry’s lips but Severus drinks them up as those eyes flutter open. “I’ll be alright,” the boy assures him and he’s falling, falling down into green orbs that go on and on and on into the blackness…

“…everus!”

He snaps back into his body with a blink and stares down at the debris littering Harry’s chest: at the herbs burnt to a crisp and the stones turned to dust. At the bubbles and streaks of ash, the lines which his blood had taken before being consumed. The side of his neck hurts just above the curve where it joins to his shoulder. He wonders if he were to reach up and touch it would his hand come away wet with blood or if the wound is deeper than that – a scar left on his magic. On his very soul.

Vaguely he’s aware of Poppy coming up beside him, of her wand flicking through familiar motions. Albus is on his other side and he’s still screaming, though whether it’s fear or fury coloring his tone Severus is not quite sure.

Both, probably.

Not that it matters, he supposes.

Nothing matters.

Nothing but the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of Harry’s chest beneath his hands and the shine of his magic, still smaller than it should be but growing: a star being reborn into the vastness of the night sky.

Severus raises one hand, blistered and blackened with ash, to cover his eyes and even with the cold shroud of occlumency dividing his mind he weeps in relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there were a way (ritual/spell/whatever) that enabled someone to remove someone's magical core it 1) is probably thought of like Horcruxes - ie: too dark even for the Dark and 2) Voldemort totally would have done it. Just to prove that he could.
> 
> A question I pondered greatly while writing this: If a wizard/witch is Kissed (and survive it) can they still perform magic? Or is the ability to perform magic lost along with their soul? 
> 
> The next several POVs will all be much shorter. (Is that good or bad? Honestly, I can never decide.) Draco, Dumbledore, Quirrell/Voldemort, Neville, and Blaise all in the works.
> 
> Blanket disclaimer that all of my spell building/associations are learnt from a mishmash of locations (both physical and insubstantial) that includes approximately 500 books on herblore (of varying legitimacy), a slightly smaller number of books on rocks and crystals (also of varying legitimacy), a relative that is obsessed with rock hunting, stories from my grandma that 7 year old me only half paid attention to, observation and/or participation in rituals of differing practices across the country/around the globe, the never ending internet, and whatever odds and ends my brain has picked up from a metaphorical dark alley somewhere. 
> 
> TL;DR - here's a general idea of what they mean, I am in no way an expert:
> 
> Pine - representative of rebirth and immortality as well as strength in the face of adversity. Frequently burned for protection, hug over thresholds to invite good energy, and used in brooms to sweep out negative energies.
> 
> Nettle - protective under a variety of circumstances with a historical association with the threshold between life and death. Carries a strong connection with the nurturing nature of a mother.
> 
> Dong Quai, also known as Angelica or Ginseng - strong associations with protection (particularly protection of women) and bringing health/hormones into balance. Frequently used in hex breaking and to ward off evil. A common tool in personal exorcisms, inducing visions, and even, occasionally, to increase luck while gambling.
> 
> Mullein - associated with death and the astral plane, frequently suggested as a substitute in workings that call for graveyard dirt, and possessing of protective and clarifying properties. 
> 
> Tansy - associated with death, rebirth, immortality, and eternal youth. In the Victorian language of flowers it denotes hostility and can be seen as a declaration of war
> 
> Mugwort + Wormwood = a combination specifically meant for the calling up/back of spirits
> 
> Labradorite - shielding/ protects against outside energies and psychic attack
> 
> Selenite - protection/ drives away darkness and shadows/ heavily associated with the moon
> 
> Obsidian - protection/ cleansing/ cuts ties that bind/ reflect negative energies away
> 
> Amber - protection/healing/luck, specifically a nuance that indicates attracting and/or beckoning. Associated with death, the spirit world, and preservation.


	11. Dangerous (Draco)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all of your amazing comments on the last chapter! 
> 
> My older kids are all off for a long weekend at Grandma's starting tomorrow and I'm fully intending to go on a manic writing binge. So maybe (hopefully) I'll have more updates here and on the main fic over the next handful of days. *crosses fingers*

There’s something wrong with Harry Potter.

He doesn’t really notice on the train, so excited to be sitting in a compartment with _the _Harry Potter. When Draco had dared imagine what the Boy Who Lived would be like he imagined someone like himself. Well, not _exactly _like himself but more… maybe like Blaise? But a little more serious. But Harry Potter is nothing like that. He’s…quiet and doesn’t speak much unless someone asks him something but when he does talk he’s warm and smiling and nothing, _nothing_ like Draco expected him to be.

As he sits in a terrible, awful little boat and crosses the lake he hopes father will be proud of him. He hopes this is okay even though Harry Potter is technically a half blood who defeated the Dark Lord. Because, now that he has met the Boy Who Lived he desperately wants to be the other boy’s friend.

Really, the first time he suspects that something is _not right_ is there in the Entrance Hall while they’re waiting to be sorted. Harry comes up the turn of the stairs and then just… stops. His eyes get really wide and he turns an odd sort of pasty gray color and _then_ he starts breathing really fast and for a moment Draco is afraid that he is going to fall down in a fit and hurt himself. But then he comes out of it, even if Weasley nearly makes things worse by gawking and grabbing at Harry’s scar like a brainless animal. But Harry gets better and then he’s sorted into Slytherin. Draco is so surprised that he nearly misses the looks on the professors faces – and he nearly laughs at the sight of Uncle Sev and the Headmaster. Both look like someone has shoved a pickled lemon into their mouth.

But things are fine and so Draco quickly forgets about the strange moment in the Entrance Hall until the evening of Harry’s physical. Of course, there have been…other incidents in the week between but they had all been easy to dismiss under Harry’s preferred excuse of _low blood sugar_ and he _does _always seem to feel better after he eats something. _And _he is awful at eating in the first place so Draco and Hannah and even the others start carrying small little snacks with them but then… then he doesn’t come _back _from his physical and suddenly every weird little moment comes rushing back to Draco and he can’t… he can’t…

He falls asleep worrying.

The next morning it turns out to be nothing. Well, not _nothing _but apparently Harry just hasn’t ever had his immunizations and Draco finds that idea terrifying enough. He vaguely remembers grandfather’s death. He remembers the frantic worry and the way father had sent he and mother away until it was all over. Remembers the hearing _dragon pox _and having nightmares for years about a dragon ripping its way out of grandfather’s skin and burning Draco alive and eating him.

So, yes, that is horrifying enough but then the next week is _awful. _Harry is pale and pinched faced and eats so slowly that Draco can almost feel how unwell the other boy is. He has never been so scared in his life as he is when Harry suddenly goes whiter than a ghost and falls over in the middle of the common room. Uncle Sev comes running when Draco screams and scoops Harry up and carries him into his sitting room where he lays him on the sofa and pours a few potions down his throat before shoving a cup of hot chocolate into Draco’s hands and settling into the large wing backed chair near Harry.

Draco doesn’t hesitate to climb up beside him, shoving and squeezing until he is trapped between the side of the chair and the warm line of his godfather’s body. He’s too big to do so, he knows, but he can’t help himself. Uncle Sev gives him a long look before sighing. He wraps an arm around Draco, hugging him gently like he used to when Draco was little.

“Is he okay?” Draco asks when he finally stopped shaking. At least he had managed not to cry. Father says he’s prone to being emotional – that he gets that from the Blacks – but he’s not _that _big of a baby.

“He will be,” Uncle Sev tells him and Draco trusts him because Uncle Sev never talks to him like he is a little kid – not like mother sometimes does - and always tells him the truth – even if it makes father and mother unhappy with him.

Draco wants to ask what is wrong with Harry but he doesn’t. His godfather wouldn’t allow such a blatant invasion of privacy. If it had been father or mother Draco could have badgered at them until they told him simply to get him to shut up but Uncle Sev simply fix him with that _look_ \- the one that says that he is unhappy and disappointed and that has never failed to make Draco feel like he is lower than a flabberworm – and boot him from the room.

So Draco doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t ask then and he doesn’t ask when it became apparent to anyone who cares to pay attention that Harry goes to the Hospital Wing twice a week. He doesn’t ask when he wakes up to use the loo and sees Uncle Sev standing at Harry’s bedside in his bathrobe and murmuring softly. He doesn’t ask when Harry starts carrying an actual _bottle _of stomach soother everywhere that he sips from nearly every time he has to move around. He doesn’t ask when Uncle Sev shows up out of nowhere and presses a small vial into Harry’s hand.

He doesn’t tell father and mother in his letters – not really – and he doesn’t ask.

He’s regretting that now.

Later, when the others ask him what happened he will only remember the screaming.

He will remember Granger, crouched over and cowering and making a frantic, repetitive noise like an animal caught in a trap.

He will remember the way Uncle Sev looks at him, remember the way his scream makes Draco flinch and jump and then _run_.

Mostly, though, he will remember the way that Dumbledore raises his hands and shouts at his godfather – at the way his voice seems to shake the very castle around them as Uncle Sev carries Harry, so small and still, into the Hospital Wing.

“You must be careful around the Headmaster,” father had told him the night before he had left for school. “He is a fool but he is a dangerous fool. Do not draw his attention and do not be alone with him. If Dumbledore wants to meet with you make sure Severus goes with you. No exceptions. Promise me, Draco.” And, frightened by the seriousness of his father’s voice, Draco had promised.

It had seemed like a ridiculous thing to promise. Dumbledore is powerful, Draco knows. He knows it like he knows his facts and figures: a blank, meaningless thing but it is a hard thing to comprehend when faced with the man himself. _A fool_, his father has always sneered and Draco doesn’t think he’s wrong. From his brightly colored robes to nonsensical words to all of those - false, sweet and sickly - smiles he beams at everyone in the Great Hall the man paints a picture of kind, harmless eccentricity and despite his father’s warning Draco has found himself, more than once, looking at the man and thinking _What is there to be afraid of?_

But now he knows.

Now he knows why father had pulled him aside and whispered those words to him. He knows why father had not wanted him to attend Hogwarts and had, ultimately, only agreed because Uncle Sev is here and would be his Head of House.

Because later, when Blaise and Hannah and Susan and Neville and Mandy all gather around and ask him what happened for a moment – just a moment – all he will be able to remember is the way that Dumbledore had shouted, how fury and hate had transformed his face into something twisted and sharp, how his blue eyes had shone so hard and bright that they had _hurt_ to look at.

_Dangerous_, father’s voice whispers in his ear and Draco can’t overcome it, can’t break away from the heat and the burn of it until suddenly he’s being pushed back into the corridor. “You need to leave, dear,” Pomfrey tells him not unkindly though her voice is a little sharp.

“But Harry…” he manages to force out.

“He’ll be fine, Mr. Malfoy.” And she’s _lying_. He knows that she’s lying. Because he… “Mr. Malfoy!” The mediwitch’s voice is shocking, soft even when raised and barely even audible over the roar of noise coming from the bed that Uncle Sev has laid Harry on. “You need to leave so that I can do my job.”

“Yes ma’am,” he manages, croaky and shaky and not at all like a Malfoy should sound but he can’t get his throat to work properly. Not his throat or his hands or his legs and he stumbles backwards until he hits the wall and slides down to the floor, unable to take his eyes off the wide wooden door that has been shut in his face.

The corridor is perfectly silent. Silent except for his own desperate gasps for breath.

_Center yourself_, he recites shakily, reaching for the memory of father’s voice. _Feel the air enter your chest. Hold it to the count of four. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale, slowly. Feel it travel out of you. Feel the way your heart beats in your chest. Is it fast or slow? _

Beneath his robes, his heart hammers at his ribs, beating so fast that Draco thinks he might be sick.

_You need to slow it down. It is your body Draco, you control it. If you cannot control it how can you expect to control anything else?_

Draco inhales slowly, stuttering as he has to force the air past the tightness in his chest. Is this how Harry feels, he can’t help but wonder. Is this what he feels like when he sways and goes pale and stares at a certain section of the wall or floor as if he is seeing something that none of the rest of them can?

“Mr. Malfoy?”

Draco scrambles to his feet. “Professor!” he exclaims and then stops, unsure exactly what is supposed to say here.

Professor Quirrell looks down at him. “Are you alright, Mr. Malfoy?”

“Yes, yes,” Draco says hurriedly and twists his hands nervously in his robes. “Yes. I’m fine. I’m just… I’m waiting for Harry,” he finally settles on saying.

“Ah, yes. Mr. Potter,” the DADA professor turns a speculative eye on the closed door looming across from them. “How is he doing?”

“I don’t know!” later Draco will be embarrassed that it comes out as a wail but right now he’s too worried to care because something is wrong with Harry and _he doesn’t know what it is_. Did the troll do something? Did it make it worse? Or is it…is it whatever was happening to him _before_? “I’ve never seen Uncle…” he catches himself and pauses to take a deep breath. _Feel the air enter your chest. Hold it to the count of four_. “I’ve never seen Professor Snape look so scared,” he finishes, willing his heart to stop beating. “And the Headmaster looked so _angry_,” he can’t help but add, shivering at the memory of that burning gaze.

He will dream of it, he is sure. Just like he dreamt of grandfather’s death.

“I imagine he is,” Quirrell agrees easily.

“Why would he be angry? Professor Snape just wants to help.” Draco knows this, is sure of it. Uncle Sev is like a mother bear with his students – or at least that’s what mother says. Draco is not quite sure what that means but he thinks it means that Uncle Sev is very protective of them, even when he sounds mean.

Maybe _especially _when he sounds mean.

For a long moment Quirrell is silent and Draco thinks that the professor isn’t going to answer him.

“The Headmaster has very uncompromising views on what constitutes the correct way to help,” the professor finally responds carefully. “Severus has always been a bit more willing to get his hands dirty.” Draco blinks at the use of his godfather’s name and looks upwards just in time to see a small smile pulling at Quirrell’s lips. It looks odd on the DADA professor’s face. “The Headmaster won’t want this to get out,” Quirrell adds quietly, seriously and he looks very, very carefully at Draco’s face. “You should make sure your father knows.”

The words are so soft that Draco barely hears them but when he does he shivers.

“Of course!” he retorts indignantly. Father would be so disappointed in him if he didn’t tell him about the troll. Plus, father is on the Board of Governors. Maybe he can figure out what happened and keep it from happening again.

Keep Harry from being hurt again.

Draco swallows roughly. He never wants to see that again. Never wants to see Harry so still and unmoving.

“What are you doing,” Quirrell breathes and Draco blinks.

“I... Pardon?”

The professor is staring at the door again, head tipped ever so slightly to the side and brow furrowed.

“Professor?”

Quirrell gives himself a little shake. “I’m sorry, Mr. Malfoy. What were you saying?”

Draco wants to ask him who he had been talking. Wants to ask if he can sense what’s going on in the Hospital Wing. He never thought of Quirrell being powerful enough for that – his classes are mostly a joke: a miserable, painful joke – but maybe he has one of the old druidic lines running through his veins. Or maybe he’s talking about something else.

“I said I’ll tell my father,” he settles for saying because he doesn’t think it would be polite to suddenly start pestering his professor like that. Especially not someone like _Quirrell. _

The professor smiles again, something small and sharp and odd against the roundness of his face.

“I could write it now,” Draco offers. He still has his bag slung over one shoulder and across his chest, nearly forgotten in the mad rush from the Great Hall and the excruciating wait for Harry. And it would give him something to do, a way to not feel so helpless in the face of whatever is going on behind the closed door.

“That would be very helpful,” Quirrell tells him and lays a gentle hand on the curve of Draco’s spine, his fingers nearly spanning from one shoulder to the other. Draco wants to shrug him off. He doesn’t like it when people just _touch_ him, when they assume that they have that privilege. He’s a _Malfoy_. But Quirrell’s hand is strangely comforting and for the first time since he got a good look at Dumbledore’s face Draco finally feels his heart begin to slow, the sense of burning fading from his eyes as if washed away by cool water.

After a few minutes Draco - somewhat reluctantly though he’ll never tell anyone that – shrugs off Quirrell’s hand and settles on the floor and removes parchment, quill, and ink from his bag. He doesn’t have an envelope with him but he supposes that it doesn’t really matter. Mother will forgive him for forgoing the niceties just the once, he thinks.

> _Dear Father,_
> 
> _A troll got into the school. I thought I should let you know that I am unhurt but something happened to Harry. Uncle Severus is looking out for him but the Headmaster is very unhappy._
> 
> _Love, _
> 
> _Draco_

It is short, the shortest letter he has ever written but he can’t bring himself to write anything else. He can’t find the words to express the way Dumbledore’s eyes had burned or how still and _empty _Harry had looked in Uncle Sev’s arms. This says all of the important things anyway.

He just hopes father will be able to do something.

“Would you like me to send it for you?” Quirrell’s voice interrupts his musing and Draco looks up past the swirl of dark maroon robes and the ends of the man’s turban to his face.

“I wouldn’t want to trouble you…” Draco begins but Quirrell waves off his objections.

“My quarters are not far from the Owlery,” he explains. “It would be no trouble to send it off before I change for my rounds. And I thought you would rather wait here for word on Mr. Potter.”

Oh.

Draco blinks. That makes sense.

“Thank you,” he tells the man with all the sincere gravity he can muster.

“My pleasure,” the man tells him and Draco doesn’t understand why he sounds amused. Though considering this is the most normal interaction he has had with the professor in the entirety of their acquaintance he supposes he shouldn’t find it too strange. Draco takes a moment to neatly fold the parchment and write father’s name on the outside and then places it in Quirrell’s outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” he says again because it is no small thing to have the gratitude of a Malfoy and Quirrell gives him another one of those smiles.

“Thank _you_,” he says in response and offers Draco a very slight inclination of his head. “Goodnight Mr. Malfoy.”

“Goodnight Professor,” Draco parrots automatically and watches as Professor Quirrell strides off down the hall, robes and turban fluttering behind him in a way that seems vaguely familiar. It’s kind of how Uncle Sev walks, Draco realizes and despite his worry can’t help but snort in amusement at the idea of Quirrell trying to imitate his godfather.

Later, when the others ask him what happened he will remember the screaming and the way Dumbledore’s eyes had burned and the way that his godfather had smelled like ash and blood when he finally emerged from the Hospital Wing and suffered through hugging Draco in a public place, murmuring reassurances that Harry would be okay in his ear.

Later, when the others ask him what happened he will remember the way his heart had pounded frantically and how he couldn’t hardly breathe and how terribly afraid he had been for Harry and even for Uncle Sev as Dumbledore had raged at him.

Later, when the others ask him what happened he will remember how Quirrell’s hand had felt cool and grounding across his back and distantly, distantly as if through a fog he will remember how the man had not stuttered.

Not even once.


	12. Calm (Dumbledore)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The writing binge continues...
> 
> This chronologically takes place during the first half of chapter 15 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show" and can be read anytime after that.

“You used Dark Magic in my school.”

Calm.

He needs to be calm. He has already lost too much control, shouting and raving and making a spectacle of himself. It’s a miracle no one saw him but Poppy. Well, and Severus, but the man hardly counts. Still, he shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have lost his temper so thoroughly.

Now that he has had a few minutes to breathe – and a calming draught he had pinched from the potion cabinet when no one was looking – it’s easy to see that. It had just caught him so off guard. First, that Severus would ignore him so and second, the blatant use of Dark Magic right in front of him after so many years had been jarring, churning memories until the best and worst of his life floated to the top and consumed him.

Severus stares back him from the other side of the desk, his tea sitting untouched in front of him. It’s not his office, more the pity. He’s had to borrow Poppy’s for this conversation, Severus digging in his heels and refusing to leave the Hospital Wing except to slip out into the hall and exchange a few words with young Malfoy after Poppy had said that the boy was waiting in the corridor for word on his friend’s condition.

“I perform Dark Magic in your school every day,” the Potions Master drawls. “As I recall, you hired me to teach it.”

Albus forces himself to exhale slowly.

Calm.

He needs to be calm.

He adds more honey to his tea and stirs it slowly, takes a moment to let the warmth of it sink into his hands.

Calm.

He fixes Severus with a disappointed look. “That is not what I meant and you know it,” he rebukes sharply and feels a surge of anger rising up in chest at such ridiculous attempts to justify the depraved by including something holding wide-scale approval. While there are certainly potions out there that are despicable, the attempt to legitimize the practice of the Dark Arts with the presence as something so vital is dangerous. Potions aren’t Dark Magic. Believing so is the first step on a slippery slope. “Whatever would possess you to do such a thing?”

He gives his head a slow shake, unable to hide his disappointment now that full might of his fury has been contained. It doesn’t matter _why_. It never matters _why_. _Why_ is just a justification to slide back into barbaric practices. He had hoped that Severus was beyond this, however. He has done so well these past ten years. He will never be a good man, no, too embroiled in the awareness of power and what it could give him if he would just pursue it, but Albus had thought that he had managed to make some progress with the younger man. He had thought that Lily’s death, if nothing else, had managed to impress on him the inevitable danger of ambition and of having so much power. He has kept him here, at the school, for his own protection. Not just from the Ministry in the aftermath of Tom’s downfall but from Severus himself. He remembers too well the sorts of things Severus had gotten up to as a student and in the immediate years following graduation, what darkness the man had wrought and encouraged in others before he was even grown.

But he had expressed remorse, had recognized the error of his ways and Albus knows just how hard that is, how difficult it had been for him and he had never ventured as deeply as Severus. Such desire for change should be encouraged. It should. So Albus had been – and _is _– willing to protect him. From the Ministry. From temptation.

From himself.

But apparently the lessons he has tried to impart have not been learned nearly as well as he had thought they had. Not if Severus is turning back to old habits at the first sign of difficulty. He doesn’t expect the man to be a saint. Even ignoring the man’s acerbic personality, it is obvious that Dark Magic has left its mark on him – quite literally in the poor boy’s case.

Change is always possible but when one has delved so deeply into the darkness it is almost impossible to ever be rid of its stain.

Albus would know. He had once walked that path. He and Gellert both. He had stopped before it was too late, had turned away from the darkness and embraced the light. Gellert… had not.

Albus swallows against the grief such memories brings, occluding away the tears that threaten his eyes and the burn in his chest.

Across the desk, Severus watches unruffled and unflappable – a sure sign that the other man is occluding as well. “It was necessary,” he says blandly. Unrepentant.

“It wasn’t,” Albus returns firmly. “We don’t even know what happened. It’s a miracle you didn’t make things worse by bringing such low magic into the mix.”

The scene in the bathroom certainly hadn’t been promising. By the time Albus had arrived, fetched by a breathless and terrified Draco Malfoy, Severus was already leaving with Harry clutched in his arms abandoning a terrified Miss Granger and a dead troll. Truly, it is the state of the troll that worries him the most. He hadn’t gotten much more than a glimpse but it had been enough to realize that it wasn’t just dead but that it had been obliterated. Viciously.

He worries what it means. Has the connection with whatever remains of Tom overshadowed Harry already? Has the prophecy child been overtaken by his enemy before he can finish what he began all those years ago?

“If I hadn’t acted, Potter would be a squib. And that’s if he lived,” Snape snaps back, a flicker of emotion showing in his eyes for the first time since they had adjourned to the mediwitch’s office. “The boy was hemorrhaging magic faster than should have been possible.”

Albus swallows around the protests he has sitting ready in his mouth. They are still valid but if he speaks them now, they will taste sour and go unheard. They are no longer the right approach.

Severus has the strongest mage sight he has ever encountered – a gift from the Prince line, no doubt. He’s always felt it unfortunate that such a gifted be wasted on someone like Severus but perhaps it is for the best. If he had such a power at his disposal, he might be tempted to use it further than is wise. Regardless, if the man says that poor Harry was hemorrhaging magic then Albus feels inclined to believe it.

“Your desire to protect the boy is commendable,” Albus says, picking his words carefully.

The look Severus gives him is scathing and sharp enough that Albus can almost feel the cut of it even though he has long since grown used to such looks from the younger man’s face.

“I do what I must to fulfill my oath,” he sneers and Albus immediately tamps down on a sigh, unsure whether to be pleased that the man obviously still holds the boy’s Potter blood against him and won’t seek to cultivate a close relationship with Harry or exasperated that the man still insists on cultivating a childish grudge against a dead man.

“And it is appreciated,” Albus tries again. “And I know, better than most, that sometimes distasteful things must be done for the greater good but there is a world of difference, my boy, between a distasteful action and dabbling in your own destruction. And that of those around you,” he adds pointedly. He keeps Severus here to keep him safe but he won’t suffer the man to lead any of his students further into the darkness than their parents have already dragged them.

Across from him Severus inhales sharply and looks away, the lengths of his hair falling forward as it always does when the man is feeling vulnerable and wanting to hide. A tell he’s never quite been able to outgrow.

“I understand,” he bites out and Albus nods. That’s as good as he’s going to get from the younger man.

“That is all I as ask my boy,” he murmurs and takes another sip of his tea to prevent himself from reaching across the desk to touch the other man’s arm. “Now, I believe I should go check on Miss Granger.”

He pauses at the door of the Hospital Wing on the way out and looks back. Severus has already taken up post at Harry’s bedside, arms crossed over his chest and scowling down at the boy and Albus can’t help the sigh that leaves him this time, safely unseen. He’s done what he can but his best is clearly not enough. At this point he can only hope that Severus will make the right choices.

Still, he resolves to keep a closer eye on the younger man. There is too much at stake not to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now for our regularly scheduled author's note...
> 
> From your comments, you've obviously caught on that not everyone experiences/feels magic the same way. As we've seen, Snape in particular experiences it viscerally and vividly. Part of this is because of his base power level (generally, the stronger you are the more aware you are of the magic around you and the more of a certain type of magic you practice the more sensitive to it you are) but it is largely due to the fact that he possesses an ability called mage sight. In Britain this ability presents itself most frequently in bloodlines that have a strong druidic presence and enables those that have it to experience the presence of magic (all magic, technically, though there are variations within each person) as a physical thing that can be seen, felt, tasted, heard, and even touched. This ability is what gives him such an edge in brewing and spellcrafting as he is literally able to pinpoint the best ways to extract and manipulate magics. Tom Riddle, Luna, and the Weasley Twins have it as well, though none of them quite as strongly as Snape. 
> 
> Dumbledore does not possess this ability. He also categorically refuses to participate in anything that might be termed Dark Magic which renders him quite blind to its presence unless he knows very specifically what he is looking for.


	13. Just A Little Longer (Quirrell/Voldemort)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be read after chapter 15 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show".
> 
> This will probably be the last of my "Peanut Gallery" writing binge chapters. Probably. I'm going to see if I can get the next chapter of the "Greatest Show" finished up during my last few days of (relatively) free time. 
> 
> Also, as I was reading through this one last time I realize that there might be some confusion over the [_bracketed_] thoughts/sensations in this chapter. The ones here belong to Voldemort. The ones in chapter 15 of "Greatest Show" belonged to Death. Death's will always be centered.

They sleep for nearly three days.

Well, that’s not quite true. But it feels like it.

Quirrell has little memory of the end of Samhain. Or the days following it.

No.

That’s not true either.

His memory is hazy, disjointed. There and not there. He can feel it and he can see it. It is both his-and-not-his like so much is these days and yet, it is different too. For most things – for _all _things, until this point – he has felt his experiences first: his touch, his pain, his thoughts, his feelings. His. But these memories, these experiences. They happened with his body and the words were spoken with his mouth but it had not been he who had moved limb and lip. He had been shoved to the side, suddenly existing only as an observer in the vehicle of his own flesh. It is unnerving.

Well, no, that's also not true.

Being under the imperius is unnerving. Floating along in a false nirvana and having no care in the world but to follow the instructions that are planted in your head – _that _is unnerving.

Having to view the actions of his own body through the lenses of his master’s being as it inhabits his flesh while still possessing the full extent of his own will and reasoning is _odd_ but not horrible.

What it is, though, is exhausting.

Vaguely, he remembers stumbling back to his quarters from the owlery and sleeping deep and dreamless, heavy as death, until the insistent buzzing of his wand against his forearm had woken him. Friday’s classes had passed in a fog and he had barely managed to nibble at a roll, mumble out that he was experiencing a migraine and stumble back to his rooms before he passed out again. As far as he can tell he slept a full thirty-four hours without moving.

[_tiredheavyweak worthit curiousinterested whatwashedoing_]

Even now, with the duality of their memories beginning to surface Quirrell is not entirely sure what had happened after he had gotten up off of the floor of the Great Hall and made his way to the third floor.

Severus had been there, he remembers suddenly. Standing in front of the door and shoving his wand in Quirrell’s face before he could finish stammering out the man’s name in surprise. He’s always thought the man a little intimidating - taller than Quirrell by a good six or seven inches and with a look on his face that usually indicates that the man is contemplating dismantling all of them and using them as potions ingredients – but having Snape’s wand in his face and all of his attention directly on him had been a whole new level of terrifying. That sort of attention is not something he – not something _they_ – want or need right now.

But more important than Quirrell’s newfound respect for the students who dare to brave NEWT Potions classes is the question what was Severus doing there? Had he been there on Dumbledore’s orders? Or had he been after the Stone himself?

And even more important than _that_ – does he suspect Quirrell?

Based on the memories beginning to play through the sluggish cloud that still fills his mind Quirrell is inclined to think that yes, Snape does.

[_alwayssosmart dontunderestimatehim_]

Even the touch of his master’s thoughts and sensations is sluggish and fleeting, if clearer and easier to understand than they usually are. He is exhausted. They are exhausted.

And for nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

[_cautiouspleasedcurious notnothing_]

“Of course, master,” he murmurs out loud, the words slurred and muffled by the pillow in front of his face. The night becomes harder to track after Snape had left him with Aurora and Septima. He hadn’t been able to sense the dark magic curling through the castle that had called to his master, not with all the other ambient magic present. Saturation alone has made him more sensitive than most to the presence of dark magic but his master’s magic is the only that he has ever been able to feel like a physical thing. But that’s exactly what it had felt like once the Dark Lord had seized control of his body.

It had been a brief, stuttered moment of panic. A moment of nothingness that was over in an instant and yet stretched forever but then the world had been there again: distant and distorted as if viewed through cracked glass and completely unlike any world that Quirrell has ever existed in.

It’s still Hogwarts. They were still walking down the exact same corridor in the exact same body but after that all similarities had ended. Between one step and the next the world had exploded into a riot of sensations that Quirrell had never felt before. Around them the castle seemed to suddenly be _alive_: a moving, breathing, speaking thing that felt less like stone and beam and more like Quirrell imagined it would be to have a dragon beneath his feet, something fierce and so very alive. Or perhaps to walk _inside _a dragon.

And it hummed. Even now, in the memory, he can hear it: a vibrating harmony that explodes like fireworks in his peripheral vision, showers of gold and silver and veins of shifting, opaline lines running through walls and across doors and tinkle like delicate chimes in his ears. There are other magics there too, darker, colder threads that taste of blood and shadow.

The ambient magic alone would have been overwhelming to his senses but the cold… Merlin help him, no wonder his master had seized control. Between one step and the next it was like he was suddenly outside lost in the dark of the night with no moon to guide him, nothing but him and the sky and snow up to his knees: crunching and clinging and chilling him right down to the bones.

He still doesn’t know what had happened. The destroyed bathroom had reeked of the cold but they had followed the trail of it to the Hospital Wing, to where Severus had taken Harry Potter.

He doesn’t know what had happened that night but it had been _something_. Something unexpected. Something important, maybe, and it had made the Dark Lord restless beneath his skin, pacing at the confines of Quirrell's flesh.

But they are still without the Stone.

Still trapped and fraying, lessening with each passing day.

[_hurttiredslipping waitedforsolong lostlostlost waitalittlelonger_]

He understands, he does.

No. That’s not true. That’s not true at all.

He doesn’t understand why they must wait. He doesn’t understand when waiting might mean his weak, miserable body giving way under the strain of containing the both of them. He doesn’t understand when such a defeat will mean that once again his master is without form and without assistance. He doesn’t understand when _wait_ might equal _failure_ and Quirrell doesn’t want to die but he doesn’t mind dying, not really, not if it will bring his master back, but the idea of him dying and it being _for nothing _is enough to make him lunge suddenly for the edge of his bed and heave over the side.

He hasn’t anything to eat or drink in nearly thirty-six hours. Nothing comes up but strings of bile and blood, luminous flecks of crimson mixing with streaks of yellow and frothy white as they hit the floor. When his body finally releases him he can’t do much more than collapse, his head and half of his shoulders hanging over the edge of the mattress, chest and abdomen sore and aching in a way that makes him think he might have cracked a rib or two. Tears drip down the line of his nose as he forces himself to breathe.

In, two , three, four.

Out, six, seven, eight.

In, two, three, four.

Out, six, seven, eight.

Whatever energy sleep has bought him is fleeing quickly, draining out of him with every breath he takes until he is stiff and numb.

Slowly, so slowly - _always _more and more slowly these days – he manages to calm the erratic racing of his heart. Eventually, after Merlin knows how long, he gathers what little strength is left to him and gets out of bed. He’s weak, so weak, shaking and unsure of his footing but he manages to make it to his bathroom where, after a moment’s contemplation, he slumps against the shower wall and lets the hot water wash over him. It’s too exhausting to contemplate reaching for soap and a washcloth so he settles, not for the first time, for getting as clean as the water pressure will make him and no cleaner.

It’s not until he’s done with his shower and standing in front of the sink, a towel wrapped around his shoulders more to ward off a chill than to actually dry him, that he dares to look in the mirror. His hair is gone, the thick red locks – true red, _red like a fox’s pelt_, his mum would say as she ran her fingers through its strands – lost to the ritual he had used to aid his master’s possession. The dome of his skull is pale and smooth but he knows that if he were to raise his hands and run them across the back of his head, he would find the rough outline of a face – a way for his master to take physical form without expending the energy necessary to take control of Quirrell’s body.

Except on Samhain he had and now Quirrell can't even wrap a towel around himself without shaking from exhaustion. How is this supposed to last? How can they continue?

Without a glamor in place the toll the past months have taken on him is easy to spot. The youthful roundness of his face, forever making him look younger than he actually is, is gone. His cheeks are thinner, sunken even, the lines of his cheekbones and jaw sharp and visible beneath fragile looking skin. His eyes, a rather pleasant shade of hazel, are dull and sunken into his face. The edges are beginning to acquire a yellowish hue and they are lined by shadows dark enough to look like bruises. Beneath the questionable covering of the towel his bones are visible: collarbones rising like jutting mountains and ribs pressing up against his skin until he can see the lines of them. His stomach is gaunt, concave from months of no appetite and bruises bloom too easily across his skin from where he has stumbled and fallen or brushed too closely against the edge of a desk or doorway: an array of blues and purples, faded yellows and sickly greens.

[_weakwitheringfallingapart forme allforme gratitudehelplessnessfrustrationpatience justalittlelonger lordvoldemortrewardsthoseloyaltohim]_

Too tired to even despair over his obvious deterioration he takes the Invigoration Draught and the Pepper Up sitting on the counter and waits for their rush to override what his body knows and convince it to move forward, to press onward with artificial strength and the illusion of energy. It is Sunday so he doesn’t bother with worrying about keeping another dosage of each on his person. He has no obligations today beyond the staff meeting after dinner.

Once dressed, he makes his way to the small table in his sitting area and takes a seat in the chair nearest the window and orders up a light breakfast from the kitchens. It takes effort, these days, to hold the teacup without shaking. His fingers feel thick and wooden as he forces them to close around the delicate curve of the handle and he has to steady it with the palm of his other hand as he raises it to his mouth. He isn’t amused by the amount of sugar that he ladles into his tea. Not anymore. Sickly sweet and gut rotting, it still might be the only thing he manages to keep down today and he huddles over it, grateful for the sweetness and the warmth that burst across his tongue and sooth the acid burns in his throat. After the tea has had a while to sit, he moves on to a triangle of toast, nibbling at its dry edges as he stares out the window and across the castle’s grounds.

It is a gray and windswept day, leaves drifting across the ground and misty clouds hanging low enough that they brush the tops of the trees, vapor mingling with gnarled wood and reaching branches until the border between earth and sky is blurred. Some of the thestrals are hunting - swooping and circling through the mist like enormous birds of prey as they eye the forest below.

Quirrell sighs.

He doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t understand what happened last night – not with Snape, not with Potter, and not with Malfoy. He doesn’t understand why the Dark Lord urges him to wait but he will. He will wait as long as his master deems necessary.

He will wait but soon, all too soon, he thinks, it will be time to consider more drastic measures.

Out in the forest, where the trees jut up against the curve of the lake, he can see a faint flash of silver amongst the trees.

[_carefuldangerousonlyifwemust justalittlelonger waitforthedarkwhentheyaregone driftinglostcomingapart justuntilthelongestnight_]

Quirrell closes his eyes.

He will wait.


	14. Not in the Realm of Normal (Amelia Bones)

Lucius Malfoy waiting calmly outside her office before eight on a Monday is not in Amelia’s realm of normal.

Contrary to what others might assume, the Malfoy Lord spends little time in her area of the Ministry. Instead, the bulk of his time is spent with the Minister, the Department of International Magical Cooperation, and the Department of Magical Commerce – all of which are located more closely to where his office up near the Wizengamot Hall. She has spoken with the man more times within the confines of various trials than she has on any other sort of business. As such, the sight of the Malfoy Lord standing in front of her office before her assistant is even in for the day is enough to make her miss a step, the rhythmic _click, click, click _of her heels against the floor interrupted by the _slllckk_ of her near stumble.

Malfoy doesn’t turn in her direction but that means nothing. She is sure that he noticed. In the murky, tempestuous seas of the Ministry Malfoy is a shark. An enormous, deliberate powerhouse that is just as comfortable in the cold, lightless depths as he is in the sun drenched, fish filled shallows: an apex predator slipping unchallenged through their world and eminently capable of tearing anything in his path into nothing but scattered flesh and clouds of blood.

She does not fear him - they have been opponents and allies both as matters have dictated and will no doubt be both again - but she would be a fool to not be wary of someone with so much power and influence.

“Lord Malfoy,” she greets respectfully once she has drawn closer, pulling her customary cool professionalism around her like a cloak. “May I be of service?”

He turns only at her voice, distinctive blue eyes giving her a brief, sweeping look before he inclines his head. “Madam Bones. I hoped to speak to you speak to you privately. Do you have a moment? It is of some importance.”

It must be, she thinks, for him to be waiting for her before the Ministry is even open for the day.

“Of course,” she agrees. “We can speak in my office.”

She unlocks her door and motions him inside. He sweeps past her and she allows herself a moment to take a single, deep breath before following him, pulling the door shut behind her.

He waits in front of her desk, staring out the charmed windows to the scene of gentle waves crashing against a sandy beach, gulls hopping back and forth on the sand and pecking at whatever bits they find at the debris left by the outgoing tide. The moment the door clicks shut behind her, the privacy wards of her office locking into place, his shoulders slump. Not much but on a man like Malfoy the slight downward, hunching curve of his shoulders is the same as lesser men collapsing into one of the chairs in front of her desk.

Something is wrong.

She is sure of it, the hair on her arms and the back of her neck suddenly prickling.

Something is very, very wrong.

“Your niece,” he says, “She is attending Hogwarts this year, is she not?”

Amelia pauses at the corner of her desk, wrist half twisting in the beginnings of the motion that will drop her wand into her hand. Is he threatening her? She’s heard the rumors and while she will be the first to admit that the man is more likely to use a well-placed bribe or promise of a social favor to get what he wants she does not doubt that the spirit of the rumors is true, if not the letter of them.

If Lucius Malfoy deigns to threaten you, it is not going to be something that you share in the breakroom.

Ever.

“Yes,” she answers slowly, watching him closely. “A first year. Hufflepuff,” she adds proudly.

Malfoy must catch the sudden thread of tension in the air because he holds out a palm in a placating gesture - a universal sign of _I mean no harm_ – and turns to face her. “I know,” he says softly. “Draco writes of her.”

Susan writes of Draco too, and it is that, more than anything else that prompts Amelia to relax her hand and take the final steps around her desk. 

“Susan writes of Draco as well,” she admits and leans against the edge of her desk. She wants to sit but she also doesn’t want to give him such a height advantage over her. The one he possesses naturally is enough. Interactions with Lucius Malfoy must be done carefully – it is, she thinks, not possible to overthink them. That is a mistake of simpler minds. “They seem to spend a great deal of time together.”

Understatement.

From what she can tell from the contents of her niece’s letters she and the Malfoy heir practically live in each other’s pockets. Or perhaps, more accurately, they – along with several others - live in the pocket of Harry Potter.

Not a development Amelia had seen coming, to be honest.

“They do,” Malfoy agrees. “Have you heard from her recently?”

Amelia’s surprised enough by the line of questioning to blink. “Yes, I have.”

Malfoy looks at her closely, pinning her in place with his icy blue gaze. “Since Samhain?”

Amelia blinks again. “No. She usually writes mid-week.” Not that it’s any of his business.

Malfoy’s shoulders seem to curl in even more and he exhales audibly.

Once again, Amelia is struck with the odd sensation that if it were a different man in her office that he would have long ago collapsed into the padded chairs sitting opposite her desk.

From the inner pocket of his robes Malfoy removes a piece of folded parchment and holds it out to her. After a moment’s hesitation Amelia takes it, a ball of worry tightening in her gut.

“I received this several hours before dawn last Friday. It was delivered by a school owl instead of Draco’s personal bird. It is his handwriting but there is…other magic there.”

Half curious, half afraid Amelia opens the note – no envelope, she notes, which is not terribly unusual, but notable all the same – and scans it. It’s nothing more than a few lines but it makes her stomach drop.

> _Dear Father,_
> 
> _A troll got into the school. I thought I should let you know that I am unhurt but something happened to Harry. Uncle Severus is looking out for him but the Headmaster is very unhappy._
> 
> _Love, _
> 
> _Draco_

“… a troll?”

“The Board of Governors has received no missives from the school,” Malfoy responds, understanding the truth of her question at once. “I was tempted to simply go to the school but was loathe to do so without any information on the matter. There is no affection and even less respect between Dumbledore and I. I made discreet inquiries amongst other parents. No one that I have asked has heard from their children since last Thursday morning.”

Something clenches in Amelia’s chest.

“And you are certain this is your son’s writing?” The handwriting is neat, elegant even, but still obviously that of a child. The only other marking on the parchment is a single, faint drop of red staining one corner as if the very edge of the paper had been held to liquid and allowed to siphon it up.

“Positive,” the man replies tightly. “There are no signs of forgery but I suppose that can’t be ruled out entirely.”

Amelia lays the note flat on her desk and calls her wand out of its holster on her forearm. She doesn’t possess mage sight, not a lick of it – though she suspects the same cannot be said for Lord Malfoy – so she must do this like the rest of the peasant masses.

“Hmmm,” she murmurs after a moment, still staring down at it. She can tell what Malfoy meant by the odd pause before _other magic_ earlier. There are a few spells attached to the note. Nothing complicated or dangerous – protection spells, mostly. Charms against weather and misdirection, things one might assign to an important package to make sure it gets to the recipient. But there’s something odd about the spells. They’ve all been cast twice by two separate magical signatures. And that is…odd. Odd too is the bit of blood staining the corner. Amelia points to it and asks, “Do you know if this belong to your son?”

“It does not. I made sure,” Malfoy responds calmly and not like he’s announcing to the Head of Magical Law Enforcement that he’s used blood magic. It’s not illegal, technically. Not the sort of genealogical magic that he would have used here but it is heavily frowned upon unless you happen to be a member of a small handful of professions – nearly all of which are associated with law enforcement or certain branches of healing magic.

Malfoy does not belong to either group.

It’s enough that she could site it as probable cause to raid his ancestral home in search of illegal artifacts and signs of illegal magics. And he just gave it to her.

Amelia narrows her eyes thoughtfully, wheels turning in her head.

“And there has been absolutely no other word about a troll in Hogwarts?”

Malfoy shakes his head. “Not a single syllable.”

“You think that whatever happened is being covered up. Intentionally,” she guesses. It’s not much of a guess. It’s where her mind went as well.

“I do.”

Amelia inhales sharply. “I don’t like it. I know Dumbledore likes to handle things…in house but if this is true, then it is something I definitely needed to hear about.” She taps at the note and takes another deep breath, course decided. “Lord Malfoy,” she begins formally, “as a member of the Board of Governors would you care to accompany me to Hogwarts?”

She doesn’t think she imagines the flash of relief that spreads across his face, the way his shoulders straighten into their familiar, indomitable line. “Madam Bones,” he drawls, cool as ice and smooth as honey, “It would be my pleasure.”

Storming Hogwarts with the company of Lucius Malfoy? Definitely not in the realm of a normal Monday.

* * *

“Come in! Come in!”

The door to the Headmaster’s office opens just as Malfoy is lowering his cane, Albus Dumbledore’s distinctive voice drifting out and beckoning them in. No one had bothered to meet them in the entry hall, despite the fact that both the Headmaster and the Deputy Headmistress should have felt the magical ping of them coming through the school’s wards. They had met no one on their walk up from the gates either. In fact, the only people they have seen at all since they arrived on school grounds have been the students. Students who had flowed around them in a sea of black, most of them doing a doubletake at the distinctive scarlet robes of the two aurors Amelia had selected to come with them. Robards because he is widely regarded as a neutral party and solid, non-reactory. Plus, he had worked for the better part of a decade in the Department for Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures before becoming an auror. Mulciber because even though he's only a year out of the auror academy and decidedly less neutral than Robards he is also well on his way to finishing a mastery in Warding.

She had been tempted to bring more just because she could but had stopped herself at two. Two is enough to back she and Malfoy up should it be necessary but not so many as to appear threatening.

Truthfully, Malfoy is threatening enough all on his own and today they are allies.

It is an odd but heady thought and definitely not one she should allow herself get used to. Powerful friends are useful but she knows better than to expect their alliance to continue.

Speaking of, she gives him a quick glance at the Headmaster’s welcome and he meets her gaze stone faced and calm. Much calmer than she feels, certainly. It had become obvious on their trek up to the seventh floor that something _had _happened here. The word ‘troll’ had been overheard no less than two dozen times before they even made it to the third floor. Each iteration of it had been a nail in heart. There had been a _troll _in the _school_, the school her niece - her only living family member, her _daughter _in all the ways that count - attends and _no one had told her_.

They hadn’t told her or the aurors. They hadn't told the school governors. They hadn’t even deigned to tell the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

They – and by _they_ she absolutely means Albus Dumbledore because in this castle he is most definitely king – hadn’t told _anybody_.

With a tip of his head, Malfoy holds the door open for her with his cane and she sweeps into the Headmaster’s office with her shoulders squared and her head held high.

“Ah, Ms. Bones!” the Headmaster welcomes jovially from behind his desk. “And Mr. Malfoy!”

Amelia’s fingers twitch at the petty disrespect but Malfoy doesn’t even blink, instead simply drawling out, “Mr. Dumbledore” in a voice that wouldn’t melt butter.

The two men stare at each other until the Headmaster’s attention is drawn past them to the aurors slipping into the office behind them.

“…and Mr. Robards, Mr. Mulciber,” he adds. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

Amelia meets his gaze firmly, willing his attention back to her and away from whatever ridiculous, petty squabble he’s decided to engage Malfoy in this time. “We are here about the troll.”

Watching Albus Dumbledore actually blink in response – even if it is only once, long and slow – might be the most gratifying experience of Amelia’s life.

“The troll?” he asks politely, gesturing at the overstuffed chairs in front of his desk. She ignores the wordless offer and so does Malfoy, which means that Robards and Mulciber do too.

“Yes,” she continues crisply. “We received a report about a troll loose in the school.”

The damnable twinkle in Dumbledore’s eyes dims a little and for the first time since they entered his office Amelia feels like they have his full attention. It is not, strictly speaking, a comfortable feeling but it’s better than waving them off like errant children – a habit he employs far too often.

“It was nothing worth worrying over,” the headmaster dismisses calmly, peering at them over the line of his spectacles. “Our Defense Professor notified of us of the issue immediately and the students were relocated to the safety of their dorms. The troll was contained within the hour and did nothing more than give us opportunity to remodel one of the student bathrooms.”

“A student was injured,” Malfoy injects silkily and the Headmaster literally waves it away with a sweep of his hand.

“Nothing that a calming draught and a day of rest couldn’t cure. It’s hardly a matter for the Ministry.”

“It is _exactly _a matter for the Ministry,” Amelia corrects, willing her climbing fury down. “At the very least the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures should have been notified as trolls are not native to this part of Britain!”

“My dear, you are making a big deal out of nothing,” Dumbledore offers soothingly. “I understand that you must be worried because of your niece but the troll likely just wandered out of the Forest. There are no small number of non-native beings and creatures that make their home there.”

Amelia is, unfortunately, well aware. The number of invasive beings and creatures that are present in the Forbidden Forest have skyrocketed in the past several decades. A fact frequently bemoaned by a significant portion of the DRCMC. Between the centaurs and the sovereignty of Hogwarts the affairs of the Forbidden Forest are a guaranteed migraine.

“Regardless of its place of residence it shouldn’t have been able to get inside the castle itself!” she retorts sharply. “We will need to take a look at your ward room. Clearly something is amiss.”

“Now, Amelia, my dear…”

“I will fetch a formal warrant if I must,” she interrupts him, daring him to make her. She doesn’t need one, not technically. She’s the Head of the DMLE and can bypass the need for it by utilizing any number of state-of-emergency laws. Undoubtedly, it’s one of the chief reasons Malfoy came to her in the first place. But getting one would require a hearing in front of the majority of the Wizengamot, most of whom have family members attending Hogwarts. The social and political fallout would be immense and Dumbledore knows it.

The headmaster capitulates almost immediately, hand held out in appeasement. “Now, now there’s no need for _that_,” he tells her, clearly disappointed with what he views as an unreasonable attitude. Amelia doesn’t care. It will, no doubt, come back to bite her on the ass at some point when he tries – and probably succeeds – at undermining her during a Wizengamot meeting or, Merlin forbid, someone's _trial_ \- but right now _she doesn’t care_. Susan’s safety, and that of all the children residing in these walls, is more important than bowing to the whims of Albus Dumbledore.

“Then your ward room, Headmaster,” she prompts. “Auror Mulciber is a journeyman warder and will be happy to look over the array to see if there is anything amiss.”

The ward room of Hogwarts is a spacious, windowless room deep several stories beneath the Headmaster’s office. The steps are steep and narrow, spiraling down, down, down until Amelia is forced to admit that they might actually be _underneath_ the castle, though she can’t be certain. Dumbledore shows them in and with a nod from her Terrence Mulciber goes to work, wand moving slowly in his hand as he moves through the slabs of stone laid out like tables, their surfaces carefully carved with runes and other symbols that Amelia doesn’t recognize. Both serve to anchor or divert the various strands of magic that even she can feel humming and crackling in the air.

“Well?” Malfoy prompts when Mulciber finally lowers is wand nearly half an hour later.

“The wards are intact,” the young man begins and Dumbledore straightens from where he has been standing silent in the corner of the room.

“See, my dear, your worry was for nothing. I told you that I had it all…”

“…but there are a few points that need to be addressed,” Mulciber continues, raising his voice to talk right over the Headmaster, glaring at the man with a look that leaves little doubt what the new auror thinks of _him_. He has a sister here, Amelia remembers suddenly. A sister in her… sixth year? Or maybe it is her seventh, now. “The troll was able to gain access to the school because there is damage to the runic anchor here,” he continues, motioning to a slab near the center. It is old enough that the edges of the stone have worn away leaving the corners rounded and crumbled. “In fact, quite a few of the strands have not been kept up appropriately and are showing some serious signs of weakening. When was the last time you had a Master in here to ensure their integrity?”

“Master Henderson in…sixty-nine?” Dumbledore muses, twiddling his thumbs. “Yes, because the poor boy suffered some spell damage during the DADA finals and quit on the spot. He works over in America now, I believe. I have looked after them since.”

Mulciber lets out something that sounds suspiciously like a curse. “For an array of this size you should really have a Master in here at least once a decade - _at minimum_ \- to make sure that everything is as it should be,” he lectures. “Have you been feeding them?”

Dumbledore’s face hardens in an instant, a thundercloud passing over normally cheerful features. “They are not that type of wards.”

“_All _wards are that type of wards,” Mulciber corrects harshly and Amelia feels nothing but dawning horror at the implication that Dumbledore has not been feeding Hogwarts’ wards. Wards that supposedly keep hundreds of children safe and the entire school hidden from the muggle world. “If you don’t feed them, they will starve and weaken. Hogwarts’ ambient magic will keep them from dying out completely but they would be stronger if fed properly and any Master worth their title will tell you the same.” He shakes his head. “Regardless, this section will need to be repaired. More unsettling, however, is this section over here.” He points to the slab nearest the door and, despite having no idea what any of this means, Amelia leans over to look at it.

Joining them, Mucliber points to a section where the runes and markings are obviously newer than those around them, the interior of the carvings somewhat lighter than the top of the stone. “Now, I am not _completely _certain, but to the best of my discernment this sequence prevents students from sending letters containing complaints about the school.”

Amelia can practically feel the temperature of the room drop, Malfoy rounding on Dumbledore in an instant, his cane suddenly clutched more like a weapon it is than a walking stick.

“Oh,” says Dumbledore, eyes widening, “Is that still there?”

“Why is it there at all?” Amelia demands, mind scrambling. A ward that prevents complaints from leaving the school? The very idea of it leaves her numb with terror.

“It is nothing,” Dumbledore dismisses. “It is… Minister Minchum had it put into place once the War began to pick up in seventy-five. It doesn’t prevent the students from complaining – no one is stopping them from offering their opinions on their studies and classmates or from being homesick,” he hastens to explain when Malfoy takes a single step forward, the slight movement settling him into a pose favored by most classically trained duelists. She’s not of a mind to stop the man. She still feels hollowed out by the words, distant from them as if she is hearing them from far away or perhaps from underwater. She had agreed with Malfoy, thought that an incident had been covered up to prevent damage to the reputation of the school and panic on the part of the parents but this… this is something so much more. So much _worse_. “It was put in place under the Statute of Secrecy to prevent muggleborns or those that had been muggle raised from exposing the nature of the War to the non-magical world. I had thought it removed in eighty-one once it was confirmed that Voldemort had been neutralized.”

Amelia is still…she is still trying to make sense of this…this… this blatant censor of student safety. How many students have tried to reach out for help over the years only for no one to answer? How many have suffered abuse or hurt within these walls because no one knew that they were in need of assistance? What crimes have been committed? Objectively, she can understand why such measures had been put in place but they rankle her all the same, leaving her numb and uneasy. And to be left in place for so long… it has been ten years since You-Know-Who died! Why had no one made absolutely sure that it had been removed? Unless certain powers hadn’t _wanted _it to be removed.

The uncertainty and horror prick and sting at her until her head begins to buzz, until her skull is filled with a swarm of scared, angry thoughts and suspicions. Thoughts that spin and spin and spin until she feels sick with them.

This was not how her Monday was supposed to go.

“Can you remove it?” she asks Mulciber, ignoring the Headmaster entirely.

“I can destroy it,” he corrects, baring his teeth.

Vaguely, over the buzzing in her head, she is aware of Dumbledore protesting. Something about the integrity of the wards but he has, as far as she is concerned, lost any credibility when it comes to the matter of wards. She certainly trusts Mulciber a great deal more than Dumbledore on the matter.

“Will it harm the rest of the array?” she asks but Mulciber is already shaking his head.

“If anything, it will make them stronger because it will lessen the draw on the school’s magic.”

Out of the corner of her eye she can see Malfoy twist slightly in her direction and can sense, more than see, the nod he gives even as she orders: “Then do it.”

It feels very anti-climactic, requiring nothing more than a sharp twist of Mulciber’s wand. An audible _crack_ sounds as the top of the slap splits, a sharp line drawing through the newer cluster of symbols. Mulciber and Dumbledore both wince and Malfoy presses his lips tightly together, staring at the stone slab as if willing it to burst into flames.

“Just the backlash of the ward breaking,” Mulciber assures. “Nothing to worry about.” He presses the tip of his wand to the stone and softly murmurs a spell. It isn’t in Latin or any language that she recognizes but beneath his wand tip the broken stone begins to shift and ripple like water. Interested, she watches until the entire area turns to liquid and smooths out, the anchors of the ward washed away. In less than a minute it looks as if they had never existed. “And _that_,” the young auror adds as he lifts his wand away, “will keep someone from trying to repair it.”

“Thank you,” she tells him sincerely. They both look to where Dumbledore is standing between Robards and Malfoy making noise about how _incredibly lucky_ they are and how he he’s disappointed that they would take such risks and maybe it’s genuine. Maybe Dumbledore really hadn’t been aware of the ward’s continued existence. Maybe he had truly believed that it had been destroyed a decade ago and maybe he really had just wanted to exercise more caution when having it dismantled. She would like to believe it – for Susan’s sake, if nothing else – but she has spent decades watching Dumbledore work. Lucius Malfoy isn’t the only shark swimming in the Ministry waters.

Amelia can’t stop the sudden shiver that races down her spine as she repeats, “Thank you.”

* * *

They spend nearly three more hours in Dumbledore’s office trying to nail down the specifics of when the mail filtering ward had been put in place and what, _exactly_, it prevented from being sent outside of Hogwarts. Dumbledore is calm and helpful – or as helpful as he ever is. It’s not nearly as helpful as Amelia would like him to be but she will take what she can get. It is only when they have left Dumbledore’s office behind that she dares clench her hands together and let them shake. With frustration, with anger, with fear.

“Thank you for your assistance today,” she tells the two aurors. Robards hasn’t spoken a word the entire time they’ve been here but his face is distinctly paler than it was a few hours ago, his mouth pressed into an unhappy line. Like Amelia, he has a reputation for a no- nonsense, no-favoritism approach to justice, making him equally popular and equally despised by the likes of Dumbledore and Malfoy but today has left him shaken and uncertain. Just like it has left her. Mulciber, on the other hand, has made no effort to hide his disdain and disgust for what can only be termed _blatant neglect_ on the part of Dumbledore and Malfoy… well. Amelia is quite honestly surprised that they made it through the morning without having to half-heartedly arrest the man for assault or even murder. Dumbledore’s life, she suspects, is about to get very, _very _uncomfortable. “Especially you, Auror Mulciber. Your assistance was invaluable and you were a credit to your Master. I’ll be sure to relay my thanks to him as well.” And see that the young man gets a commendation in his file and quite possibly a small bonus. Truly, she doesn’t wish to think about how today might have gone if she hadn’t come prepared with the right someone.

Mulciber’s mouth quirks just a little: that there-and-gone Slytherin smirk that says the idea amuses him. “Just doing my job, Madam. I’m glad I could help.”

“Officially, I will have to speak to the rest of the Board before any decisions can be made,” Malfoy adds, rolling his cane between his fingers, “but unofficially I will pay for a Ward Master myself if I have to. Do you think your Master would be willing to consult on the matter?”

“Of course,” this time Mulciber’s smile is more teeth than anything else. “Master Lestrange would never pass up the opportunity to stick something to Dumbledore.” Beside him, Robards lets out a huff that might actually be laughter, if slightly hysterical. Amelia empathizes. Deeply. Merlin, she needs a drink. Just a little nip to steady her nerves. “I’ll inform him to be on the lookout for your owl?”

After a quick exchange of glances both Amelia and Malfoy nod. “You may inform him that it has to do with the wards at Hogwarts but I don’t wish either of you to go speaking to others about what occurred here today,” Amelia is quick to clarify. “Lord Malfoy will need to speak to the school governors and there are avenues at the Ministry that I will need to explore before anything is done.”

Both former Minister Minchum and former Minister Bagnold are dead, unfortunately, which means her only recourse is to hope that the instructions for the warding is hidden in the Archives or perhaps still kept in the Minister’s office. Fudge is going to lose his mind over the opportunity to smear Dumbledore and she just wants _answers_. Merlin and Morgana, this will probably end up before the Wizengamut before she’s done. She’ll have to deal with a _committee_.

She is quite sure that her distaste shows on her face.

“If I can offer any assistance on your end of things, please, do not hesitate to reach out,” Malfoy tells her and she nods.

“I will,” she replies and means it. She’d be a fool to refuse the help of the man holding Fudge’s leash – and right now she will take all the help she can get to clear up this mess. It’s Susan’s safety on the line. Malfoy has a son. He understands. “You may return to the Ministry,” she tells the aurors. “If you could write up reports about our visit and submit them to me before you go home tonight, I would be appreciative. It is possible – _likely_,” she corrects, “that you will be called to give testimony at some point.”

Robards offers her a small bow. “Of course, Madam.”

“You’ll have it,” Mulciber agrees grimly. “And I’ll speak to Master Lestrange.”

“I need to see Susan,” she finds herself admitting once the two red clad men have begun their descent back to the ground floor. Beside her Malfoy lets out a sigh so deep she can feel the mass of him deflating.

“I had planned to seek out Draco as well,” he admits in return, leveling the field between them. “This whole experience has been… unsettling.”

Because Draco is the one who had sent them the note, Amelia remembers suddenly. The details of their encounter in her office this morning feel fuzzy, the experience so far away from where they are now. Draco had sent the note, the note that shouldn’t have been able to make it through the wards. The note that shouldn’t have been able to be delivered.

How had he managed it?

Giving her head a little shake, Amelia pushes the unanswered questions away for later, for when she is no longer standing in the heart of Dumbledore's domain. “I imagine that they are in the same place,” she says instead of voicing all the thoughts swirling in her head. “It’s just about lunch, isn’t it?”

“Together?” Malfoy offers her his arm and she eyes it for a moment. It’s not just chivalrous assistance down to the Great Hall that he’s offering and they both know it.

Taking a deep breath Amelia meets his cold blue gaze and lays her hand on his forearm. “Together,” she agrees.

Allies. For now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canonically there are two Mulcibers mentioned: one is a contemporary of Tom Riddle and one of the original Death Eaters. The other is his son and in the same year as Snape and the Marauders. I've created another who is the younger son of Mulciber 1 and made mention to his younger half sister (father's second marriage) who is still attending Hogwarts. Robards is a nod to character who later goes on to head the Auror Department and is (presumably) canon Harry's boss prior to Harry taking over the Department.
> 
> I have also invested probably more time than is strictly healthy trying to think of a logical explanation for the lack of outside adult/authority involvement in the dangerous (and frequently illegal) happenings going on at Hogwarts. Something that prevents any serious complaints from leaving the school is the best I can come up with without making Dumbledore into a supervillain (which is not quite what I'm after for this fic). Especially if it is a measure that he didn't implement but just... conveniently neglected to have removed in order to keep undesirable influences from disturbing his shaping of young minds and nudging them along the correct path. ("Everything was so chaotic when Voldemort fell, you understand don't you? Our entire world was in upheaval. I was so busy between the school and the Ministry, I don't think I slept until the middle of November.")


	15. Just the Beginning (Lucius)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was in the middle of working on the next chapter of Greatest Show and this just...fell out. Takes place immediately following the last chapter (Amelia's pov) and during the beginning of Chapter 16 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show.
> 
> And since I forgot to include it with last chapter's notes and it's still relevant for this chapter: personal fancast for Amelia Bones is Miranda Otto.

The dungeons are cool, even compared to the rest of the castle, the air heavy with moisture trapped by earth and stone. Sound is odd here, both quiet and amplified. The soft hush of his robes scraping against the wall as he turns the corner, the quiet _tap, tap, tap _of his cane against the floor are there but not there. Their origin falls dull and flat but the echoes linger in his ear. Though familiar, this is not his home, not his land, but he feels the hum of it rise up and greet him all the same: one of her lost children returned home. He presses his gloved hand to the wall in greeting but he does not stop. His time is limited if his wandering is to escape Dumbledore’s notice. No matter how slowly she walks, Madam Bones will cross the wards eventually and despite the disdain Dumbledore has shown for their care, he no doubt still makes use of them while they stand.

Severus is exactly where he expects to find him, given his absence in the Great Hall: hunched over the desk in his office and ripping through innocent essays with blood red ink in one hand while a simple sandwich sits half eaten next to his other. The younger man is aware of his presence though he offers no acknowledgement, has likely been aware of it since Lucius rounded the corner. The days in which he could catch Severus unaware without forethought, preparation, and a great deal of luck on his part is long past.

He raps smartly on the frame of the door with the head of his cane. Once, twice, asking entrance.

Severus looks up. “Lord Malfoy,” he greets evenly. “How unexpected. What may I do for you?”

“Master Snape,” he tempers the coolness of his voice with the use of the man’s preferred title and sweeps into the room. “I’m here because I received a troubling letter from Draco concerning a troll loose in the school.”

Severus straightens in his chair, his finger tapping the desk top once as he lays down his quill. “A startling occurrence but not entirely unexpected given how close the creatures lurk. It was resolved.” He leans back, the long lines of his fingers drumming twice against his black clad forearm. The air is so thick in the office that it’s difficult to breathe and Lucius tightens his grip on his cane, well versed in the signs of Severus’ fury burning beneath the surface of his control.

“Be that as it may, the governors will be looking into it. Madam Bones was kind enough to bring someone out to look at the wards,” Lucius sneers, layering his voice with so much disproval that he practically chokes on it. The hand on his cane shifts, moving it back and forth. _Tap, tap_ it goes, unhappy. _Tap, tap, tap_, _tap _after a pause.

"How delightful that some people can finally be bothered to do their jobs,” he drawls in response, daring to raise an eyebrow in silent judgement. But Lucius knows Severus, has known him since he was a skinny, pinched faced first year with an appalling accent and robes decades out of date. He knew him before he mastered control of himself and knows what to look for: the barest tightening of the grip his fingers hold on his arm, the slight flattening of his lips there in the center, the stiff tension around the edges of his mouth that begs permission to morph into lines. All signs that the younger man is holding on to his iron, biting cool by the tips of his fingertips.

There is a horribly fascinated part of Lucius that wants to prod the man into an explosion, just to see what happens.

“Some of us have better things to do than swoop about a castle all day,” Lucius points out coldly, emphasizing _swoop_ with a single, solitary _tap_ of his cane. “However, Draco expressed quite a bit of concern for his… friends. I understand one of them was injured? It must have not been too badly if they are out of the hospital wing already.”

Severus dismisses him with a sharp gesture of his hand, all five fingers fanning out across the desktop and ruffling the essays awaiting their death. It’s a struggle not to let his eyes widen in surprise. “They were there less than twenty-four hours,” Severus confirms and straightens the disrupted stack with a single finger. “Beyond that, I am not permitted to speak regarding the well-being of a student in my care. Not unless this is a formal visit?”

Lucius shakes his head. “Just a concerned parent. It wouldn’t do to have something happen to Draco. Madam Bones may require your testimony, though. You know how she gets.”

The two men exchange a look that is not at all feigned.

“Then I will give it to her, if she requires it. Is that all, Lord Malfoy? I must finish reviewing the latest attempts at knowledge regurgitation before my next class.”

“Of course.” Lucius bends his head, makes the acknowledgement stiff and sharp. “Thank you for your time, Master Snape.”

He leaves the castle quickly, taking full advantage of the length of his legs to take him from the familiar walls without making it look like he is running. Instead he glides down the front steps and follows the curve of the graveled road as he moves down the slopes of the hill the castle is set on. Outside, he is calm, contained, driven. An important person with important places to go who will not suffer the fools that get in his way.

Inside, he is a mess.

His heart beats erratically against the cage of his ribs, mind numbing fear for Draco and indescribable, incandescent fury at the idea that his _son _should not have been able to contact him, to ask for his assistance twisting and churning until he can taste the bitter blend in the back of his throat. His fingers itch where they clutch at his cane, aching to remove his wand and use it, aching to simply take the snake-headed thing and beat someone to death with it. He has never understood the appeal of such actions, the physical, plebian nature of such violence making his lips curl with distaste. But he begins to understand now, the knowledge that Severus had given him making him wish to give in to the emotions trying to take control of his flesh.

They have not spoken in such a way in over a decade, not since the awful, dreadful days of Narcissa’s pregnancy with Draco. Not since Severus has had to offer reassurances and instructions to Narcissa while he conveyed in taps and gestures the true state of things to Lucius without ever saying a word. Not since the final months of the Dark Lord's campaign, when madness rules and everything began to go wrong.

Now, his head swims with what Severus has told him.

The intrusion of the troll had been handled but not well and Severus’ admission that the injured body was one of _his _students supports Draco’s message, even though Harry Potter had looked well – if small and a tired – when he had seen the boy not a quarter of an hour ago. More shocking is Severus’ assertation that Potter’s injuries had been fatal or near enough as to almost not matter and the man had been responsible – or is _still _responsible – for his care. There had also, if he read the man correctly, been a second student suffering injury of some form, though not something that had actually been _harmful_.

A calming draught, Dumbledore had claimed. Perhaps in reference to this unknown second student.

More, Severus had not been able to tell him. The cold, appropriate refusal telling Lucius that there is something else _to_ know and that it is either protected within the legal bonds of confidentiality between healer and patient or that it is somehow tangled up whatever oaths Dumbledore has hamstrung Severus with.

Or, quite probably, both.

In return, Lucius had tried to convey the issues with the wards, cursing that he could only tell his son’s godfather that there were multiple issues – some of which were worrisome but not dangerous and some of which were extremely harmful – but that both the Board of Governors and the DMLE were aware of it and seeking to rectify it. He told Severus that he expected it to be messy, that at some point the man might be required to formally testify – to Lucius, to Madam Bones. Possibly to a committee. Maybe even to a courtroom.

Merlin, part of him hopes they make it as far as a courtroom. Part of him doesn’t.

It’s an opportunity, a golden one, not to oust Dumbledore – Lucius is well aware that it will take more than _mere _child endangerment and blatant favoritism to heave the Headmaster from his place of power – but to limit him. Additional oversight at the school, perhaps. Salazar knows that if Corentin Lestrange gets his claws into Hogwarts and her wards that the only way to remove the tenacious bastard will be if he’s dead. However, if he and Madam Bones handle the situation correctly, they might at least confine Dumbledore’s power to Hogwarts. Officially, anyway. Lucius does not doubt that several key members of both the Ministry and the Wizengamot will still beg for the old man’s advice – even Fudge, when the pompous, overblown idiot wants to illustrate that he still possesses a spine.

Fudge doesn’t, of course, but it’s polite to let the man think so.

But to strip Dumbledore of his position as Chief Warlock? To bar the condescending, self-righteous fool from the Wizengamot, from passing laws and sitting judgement?

That would be a coup indeed.

“That was quick,” Madam Bones offers in greeting as he falls in beside her. She must have truly been taking her time, wandering too and fro in thought – feigned or otherwise – in order for him to catch her before she reached the gates.

“Time is valuable,” he demurs. He feels more comfortable speaking here in the open air than he had in the castle but this is still Dumbledore’s kingdom and Lucius is not fool enough to believe that just because they are outside of Hogwarts’ walls and beyond the sight and hearing of its portraits that they speak in private. “Speaking of, I know it has been a considerably long morning – one that you did not expect. Allow me to buy you lunch before you return to the office. I know just the place to enjoy some quiet and regain your bearings.”

Madam Bones fixes him with a searching look, one that says that she knows what he is up to and that his invitation to lunch has exactly nothing to do with wanting her to relax before she returns to the Ministry. She has always been a remarkably smart woman, too fair by half and devoted to justice in a way that has typically rendered her useless to him at best and his enemy at worst but this time, this time they are on the same side and all of that ferocious commitment to justice will be working for _him. _

_With _him, he corrects and offers her his arm as they pass through the gates and out of Hogwarts’ wards. “Shall we?”

She sighs, something that might be a smile tugging at one side of her mouth as she places her hand back on his arm. “Very well,” she agrees, sounding not at all put out. “But only if you call me Amelia. I suspect we will be spending a great deal of time together in the future.”

“Only if you offer me the same courtesy,” he is quick to return and she nods decisively.

“Lucius, then.”

Looking back up at the castle he lays his hand over hers and tightens his hold on his cane. For a moment he can taste blood on his lips, blood and the buttery-rich silk of egg yolk.

Life amidst death.

New beginnings out of decay.

Is this what it had meant? Or had the portents referred to something else?

Maybe it is both.

Maybe this is just the beginning.

With one last glance at the woman beside him to gauge her readiness, Lucius turns on his heel and takes them away with a mighty _crack_.


	16. Annoyed (McGonagall)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chronologically, this takes place around the end part of Chapter 16 and the flashback sequences of Chapter 17 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show. It can be read any time after Chapter 15.

Severus hasn’t spoken to her in three weeks. She can’t decide whether she’s annoyed or impressed.

Annoyed, Minerva decides firmly as the man completely evades her attempts to catch his attention and continues on down the corridor.

Definitely annoyed.

It’s not that she doesn’t understand where he’s coming from – she does. If he had brushed aside the concern of one of her lions she would have rained hell down on him. She would have marched into his office, blown up in his face, and told him – in exact, uncompromising terms – what he had done wrong. Then it would all be out in the open and they could discuss this like adults. Instead, he’s shunning her like a petulant child and she longs to take her animagus form just so that she can lay her ears flat against her head and hiss at such underhanded and juvenile tactics.

Instead, they’re stuck in this ridiculous tantrum that the man insists on throwing. It’s not like Potter still blames her for anything. Clearly, he’d found her actions disappointing – so had she, if she’s being honest. James and Lily’s boy had needed her and she hadn’t been able to help him. But he had called her out on it, had laid her open and scraped out her insides, and now everything is back to normal.

Everything except for Severus, that is.

Well, everything except Severus and the impending audit and care of the castle’s wards but she can’t do anything about _that_.

_Ach._

She longs to be a cat simply so she can lash her tail. There’s no human equivalent for a good tail lashing.

The only thing that stops her from losing her composure completely and just _screaming _there in the middle of the fourth-floor corridor is the sudden appearance of three second year Ravenclaws rounding the corner. Despite her otherwise thunderous mood she can’t help but feel a small smile pull at the inside of her mouth at the sight of them. They’re deep in conversation and don’t notice either professor until Severus is sweeping past them and then, in almost slow motion, all three of them freeze like mice finding themselves in a cat’s line of sight, their faces paling and their eyes widening almost comically.

“Miss Chang. Miss Edgecombe. Miss Hawkins,” Severus rumbles in greeting. Poor Miss Edgecombe actually _squeaks_ just like the terrified mouse that Minerva had been comparing them to half a second earlier and the entire trio seems to shrink back. “Not dawdling, are we?” Severus inquires silkily and almost as one the three girls frantically shake their heads from side to side.

“N-no Professor,” Miss Chang manages to stammer out. “Just headed back to the Tower."

Severus’ face is turned just enough that she can see the edge of his eyebrow raised in silent judgement. “Hmmm. Do see that you get there in a timely manner. I would hate to have to catch you somewhere you’re not supposed to be.”

The three girls stare at him.

Severus sighs.

“Off you go,” he drawls, shooing them away with a motion of his hand. Miss Edgecombe lets out another squeak and the three do as directed, fleeing down the hall like frightened little mice and passing her by with barely mumbled greetings.

Minerva inhales so sharply it hurts as she watches them run away. She understands, even if she doesn’t exactly condone, the sharpness and intimidation that the man must exhibit in his classes. Potions can easily be a dangerous subject and regardless of whether she approves of his teaching style she must acknowledge that there have been no fatalities or serious injuries incurred during his tenure, which is more than she can say for any single ten year stretch of Horace’s. Still, he doesn’t need to persist in terrifying students outside of class. He’s always been a sharp man: a caustic, biting creature but _honestly_, this is too far.

“Severus!”

He ignores her.

“Severus!”

He doesn’t even bloody twitch, the bastard.

“Severus! Stop being such a coward and _speak to me_!”

And oh, that gets a reaction. Ahead of her, Severus stills in the middle of the corridor, halting so suddenly that his robes swirl and eddy around him as he pivots just enough to glance behind him.

“A coward?” he inquires mildly as she huffs up to him, heels clicking smartly across the stone floor. If she were calmer the sharp quiet of his voice would have pulled her up short but her dander is well and truly up and the warning goes unheeded.

“Yes,” she hisses as she stops next to him, “you’re being a coward!” A _bloody coward_ she wants to say, along with several other phrases that the students would be shocked to find out she knows. “This has gone on long enough Severus Snape! Now stop running from it and just deal with it!”

Severus raises an eyebrow. “Have you been in the catnip again?” he drawls and Minerva nearly transforms right that instant just so that she can scratch his ankles bloody, never mind that there’s at least an entire sheep’s worth of wool between her claws and his skin.

“No, I have not been in the _catnip_,” she all but growls. “I am talking about how you have been ignoring me for three weeks!”

“…I haven’t been ignoring you.”

“Severus Snape,” Minerva hisses, “Don’t you dare lie to me. I spent ten minutes at dinner last night trying to get you to pass the gravy!” The eyebrow goes higher. Dubiously. The sheer _nerve _of him. “I was sitting right next to you!”

“I am sorry Minerva,” he apologizes and she wants to be mollified, the words are exactly what she wants but the way he says them – so even and calm – they’re utterly empty. If he means them, Minerva will eat her hat. “I was busy looking after my students.”

“_That_,” she finally manages to force out between the tight clench of her lips, “was entirely different. I wasn’t trying to harm the boy! How was I supposed to know he would go running off?”

“Well,” Severus murmurs, “most people find out what is happening by _listening _when someone is speaking to them.”

“Because you’re one to talk about that!” she snaps back, fuming. The blood _hypocrite_. She’s been trying to talk to him for almost a month so that they might resolve this and he bloody well _knows it_.

Severus tips his head to one side, eyeing her with dark eyes set in a perfectly blank face. She can’t ever tell what the man is feeling or thinking. It’s like he’s not even human half the time. It’s not right. She stares back, lips pressed tightly together and shoulders drawn high, bristling. It takes her a minute but she manages to draw a breath and let it out slowly.

“I _am _sorry about that, Severus,” she says. “Do you think that I don’t know that I did wrong? To James and Lily’s boy, who’s practically my own blood? Who I bounced on my knee as a wee babe?”

“And if it hadn’t been Potter?”

Minerva blinks, caught off guard both by the question and by the way that Severus’ voice has grown deeper, the edges of his words sharp and clipped and so different from accent he had arrived at Hogwarts with. “But it was,” she persists, because she knows – even if he refuses to speak of it, even if no one else ever mentions it – she remembers the time when he and little Lily Evans had been joined at the hip. That Minerva nearly got her son killed through her inattention is more than enough to make the man staring down at her furious. She knows, childish as it is, that this tantrum he has been perpetuating is his own way of punishing her for letting harm come to Lily’s child.

“And if it hadn’t been?” Severus repeats harshly. “If it had been Mr. Malfoy or Miss Parkinson? If it had been Mr. Jugson or Miss Fawley? Miss Mulciber or Mr. Rowle? Would you be sorry then?”

She stares at Severus, the blankness of his face twisted into a sneer and feels her eyebrows knit together at the unexpected question. Why does it matter if it had been them? It hadn’t been. It couldn’t have been. They would never have asked her – a thought which she manages to voice after a several seconds of trying to make sense of the direction the conversation has taken.

“They would not have tried to tell you,” Severus says, agreeing, though there’s something in the rumble of his precise voice that makes her teeth hurt. “They know better. You are an excellent teacher, Minerva, so I must thank you for reminding me of a lesson that I had nearly forgotten.”

“Oh?”

The look he gives her is enough to make her take a step back, makes her suddenly aware that she is alone in a hallway and hissing at a man who carries the shadow of a Dark Mark on his arm. A shadow of something moves through his eyes at her movement, there and gone too fast to identify.

He takes his own step back, crossing his arms and tucking his hands underneath them. “You reminded me that in the Hogwarts of today that Slytherins are not worthy of help or attention from those outside our ranks, no matter our name or standing. For the well being of my students it is a lesson I shall not endeavor to forget again.”

Minerva swallows roughly, staring at the man she has known since he was a gangly child in worn robes so big he tripped over their hems. He had been a brilliant, if misguided and unkind student. As a man he is still brilliant and unkind but he has also matured into fierce and _dangerous. _The two visions of him swim together in her head, the awestruck child and the former Death Eater, the child who had sat beneath a tree and braided little Lily Evan’s hair and the man who had done dark and terrible things to dedicate himself to a monster and then done even more evil in his service. The man who had twisted back on himself and all he served in an attempt to save a friend who had not spoken to him in years.

She’s abruptly unsure and it irks her, makes her skin prickle with distaste for being caught off guard. 

“Severus…” she tries, unsteady and hesitant. She had meant to confront him about his childish retribution, get it all set behind them, but abruptly she’s not actually sure that they’re having the same conversation.

“Good night, Madam.”

Minerva stares, eyes wide and lips pressed together as Severus turns his back on her and walks away. The sheer shock of his interruption, of the deliberate use of her title instead of her name silencing her more thoroughly than any spell. She stands, alone in the corridor, her stomach full of a queasy, falling sensation and the awareness that something has gone suddenly, terribly wrong.

She just doesn’t know what.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ended up nothing like I thought it would. In fact, the way it wrote threw me so badly that I've sat on it for nearly two weeks while I've tried out writing it different ways and poking through my notes to see if it would fuck anything later before throwing up my hands in defeat. I've long since accepted my place on the unstoppable crazy train that is this universe so I don't know why I bothered to fight it now. 
> 
> Obviously, this means we'll all be getting more McGonagall and Snape centric chapters down the line. As much as I love (and I do, so much) fics that cast McGonagall as a friend or surrogate mother to Snape, I feel it's pretty clear canonically that they weren't much more than colleagues and that their rivalry over Quidditch was probably the friendliest thing about their relationship. I also feel honor bound to point out that McGonagall is not bad person but she definitely has some innate prejudices that she's never really noticed (or even thought of as prejudices) that she has to confront and deal with. Plus, she even though she objectively recognizes Snape as an adult there is a large part of her that still struggles to think of him as anything beyond "that awkward, troublesome student who fought with my favorites and ran with the Wrong Crowd". She is convinced that because she has apologized to Harry that the whole thing is over and done with, forgiven and forgotten except for the fact that Severus is punishing her through petty tactics (which, he absolutely is but...). She is unaware that this is the metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back of Harry's trust or that, now that she's confronted him, Snape is suddenly dealing with all the feelings of being ignored/blamed/dismissed during his school years and is 5000% done. 
> 
> Finally, because several people asked, the way of communicating that Severus and Lucius utilized in the last chapter is based upon a way of communicating that my best friends/roommates and I developed during our freshman year of college. It was developed as a way to check on each other in stressful/dangerous situations though it eventually made its way into everyday conversations and we still utilize it over a decade later. It's built upon a scale of 5 in which 1= yes/fine/good and 5= dead/nearly dead/absolute disaster/call the cops/get me out. The numbers were the important part and as such could be relayed in everything from taps/knocks/squeezes to fingers being held up to the number being included in a verbal or written conversation. And while they were originally meant to answer the simple question of "How are you?" we soon began to use them as Severus and Lucius did - as a way to carry on a different but probably related thread of conversation or emphasize/correct certain things that we were saying out loud.


	17. Common Bladderwort (Neville)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chronologically takes place as the same time as the first part of Chapter 17 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show (roughly the first week of December 1991, for the curious) and can be read at any point after that.

There is some bladderwort tucked up near the boulders that sit half tumbled out in the lake. This late in the year it’s mostly frostbit, browned and wilted beneath the onslaught of the chill that’s tightening its grip on the highlands but the fan of pod covered vines are distinctive and there are still a few bits around the center showing some green. Neville leans forward, carefully keeping his boots back from the lake’s edge, and prods at the mass with a length of stick. Some of fronds break off and slip away in a trail of murky water, slimy and limp but the rest… Neville leans forward a little more and studies the rest of it.

It’s a little raggedy, he decides after a moment, but enough of it will probably survive to make it until spring. Still, he could probably revive it if he scooped it up and brought it in out of the cold. It’s not a particularly fascinating plant. It’s non magical and common - literally _common bladderwort _\- but he thinks he’s read about it being used in a few healing potions. Draco or Blaise might be interested and it would be nice to have more to talk to them about. He’s perpetually surprised that they’re still talking to him at all even though it’s been three months and they’ve had plenty of opportunities to find other friends - _better friends_ \- and not just stick with the lump they sat with on the train. That’s probably because of Harry, which means they’re probably not going anywhere but still, it’s nice to have a topic to fall back on so that they don’t realize how useless he is.

Plus, it’s carnivorous. Hannah will probably be excited about that.

Except, if he takes it back to his dorm then it, and the lake water it lives in, will probably end up all over his bed when the other boys start messing around. They’ve already knocked over Trevor’s habitat twice and the rosemary he brought from home got trampled beyond saving by Weasley while he was chasing around his rat there in the first week. So setting up a basin of lake water by his bed is probably just asking for cold, damp bedding. Hannah would probably take care of it for him he asks her, except he doesn’t want her to think that half-dead bladderwort that he fished out of the lake is her gift. He has something much nicer in mind for that. There’s this variety of magical roses from Spain that are not only carnivorous but big enough that their natural prey extends to small birds. Not that Hannah will be feeding it small birds but poultry is a bit easier to come by in the Great Hall than fish.

Maybe one of the other boys would keep it?

He gives it another tentative prod and it bobs in the lake water but nothing else breaks away from the main mass of it, several turions already clearly formed and ready to sink to the bottom of the lake if the water freezes. Maybe he’ll just take one of those. It won’t be a proper plant for a while but then he wouldn’t feel bad about asking one of the others to look out for it. But then what’s he going to do with it? It’s not like he can bring it home with him. Taking a basin of water on a train ride full of rowdy, excited students is probably just asking for cold, damp robes. Even more so than trying to grow it in his room, given what happened with Trevor on the ride up.

Neville sighs and leans back. He’ll just have to leave it. It’s just a bit of common bladderwort. It’s nothing important.

Kind of like him.

The others are all further up from the shore beneath a Scots Pine – a larger, craggily looking one that hugs the sharp slope of the land leading away from the lake, its roots sunk deep down into the rocky soil and its limbs twisted and contorted from decades – maybe even centuries – of enduring wind and storm. Harry is perched on a blanket that they’ve spread out across the cold ground, holding court. That’s how Neville thinks of it anyway, even though he knows Harry would make a face if he ever said it out loud. But it’s true. They gather around him like lords to a king, like planets orbiting a sun.

No, Neville corrects as he watches them, not planets. Flowers. They follow Harry like he is the sun, rooted in their own places but turning to face him wherever he wanders and growing stronger for basking in his presence.

Harry would probably make a face if Neville ever told him that.

“What are you doing down here?”

Neville jumps at the voice, unexpected and so close, and promptly slips on the damp rock.

“Careful!” Blaise says cheerfully as he catches him, grabs him around the upper arm and hauls him back to his feet. If he feels the way Neville shrinks away from the unexpected touch, he doesn’t say anything but he must feel it because he gentles his hold, supporting him lightly until he’s sure Neville isn’t going to fall over like the clumsy oaf he is. “Be a bit cold if you ended up in the lake.”

Neville manages a nod. “Y-yeah.”

Inside he winces at the stutter, part of him cringing away from the reprimand that never comes. No one has ever commented about here – not Harry or any of them, anyway – but…

… _“Speak up boy! Open your mouth and speak properly! Heir to the House of Longbottom and you can’t even fucking speak. A simpleton and a squib to boot! At least you parents are spared the disappointment but the rest of us have to muddle on so open up your mouth and speak!”..._

“You okay?”

Neville blinks and finds that Blaise has moved closer, dark eyes watching him carefully. He swallows roughly and nods. “Y-yeah.”

Blaise stares at him for a moment longer before shrugging, accepting and easy. “So…” he drawls and when Neville blinks in confusion the other boy smalls, a quick flash of white teeth against his dark skin. “What are you doing down here?”

“Oh.” Neville swallows again. “J-just l-looking for p-p-plants.”

Now it’s Blaise’s turn to blink as he turns a careful eye to the empty looking shoreline. They’re opposite the forest and the banks are steep and rocky here, nearly cliffs a little further on. Outside of some moss, the occasional scrubby looking pine, and a few patches of stubborn grasses and thistle that are starting to look a little more yellow than green there’s really nothing but stone and dirt to see.

“Find anything?” he finally asks, sounding amused. Neville listens to his voice for a minute, turning it over in his head before deciding that Blaise isn’t poking fun at him. He’s actually asking.

“J-just some common b-bladderwort.” He carefully points out where the aquatic plant is bobbing gently on the surface of the lake and Blaise actually crouches down to get a look at it. “It’s c-carnivorous,” he adds because he can’t think of anything else to say.

Blaise looks up at him, smirking. “Better not let Hannah know,” he says and it sounds like he’s about to laugh… but not _at _Neville. Or Hannah. If anything, he sounds happy and _fond_ and like…like it’s supposed to be a secret just between them but a not serious secret. Which Neville doesn’t really understand but he’s trying to because Blaise is always like that, full of smiles and laughter and jokes that are actually funny and not…not ones that hurt. “She’ll want to scoop it up and take it back to her dorm.”

“I th-thought the s-same thing,” Neville can’t resist saying, even though it means more speaking, feeling warm and pleased that he’s not alone in this, that Hannah’s excitement about feeding carnivorous plants isn’t just something that he’s built up in his head in order to make himself feel included. Blaise has noticed it too. “But…” he trails off, unsure of how to lay out his fears that she would be insulted by such a common, non-magical plant or his worries over it ending up all over someone’s bed or it not receiving the proper care.

Blaise eyes him for a moment and then smiles. “Bit hard to take care of it with the break coming up,” he agrees with a nod as if the reason is clear as day. “I’m lucky that Harry is staying over the holiday and is fine feeding Mr. Grabby for me. For a minute I thought I was going to have to ask the Professor.”

Neville shudders at the thought. Professor Snape isn’t as bad as the rest of the Gryffindors say he is but he’s still scary. He’s very big and very strong and very fast and he doesn’t make hardly any noise when he does move, which makes Neville feel rather queasy around the man but he’s not…he’s not evil and dirty like most of his dormmates seem to think he is. He’s stern and strict but he’s nice, in his own way. At least to Neville but maybe that’s just because he is…friends, after a manner… with Harry and Draco and Blaise. Professor Snape _is_ very protective of his Slytherins, whether he likes them or not, and that seems to extend at least a little to any friends his students have in other houses. As long as they don’t cause trouble, anyway, Neville mentally corrects, thinking of the potions class last week when he’d had to work with Seamus and their cauldron had melted _and _exploded.

He tries to picture Professor Snape feeding small bits of fish to a potted Norwegian Giant’s Beard and he really just… can’t.

“He’d have done it,” Blaise assures him, grinning at the look of disbelief that must surely be on Neville’s face. “Though he’d probably have docked points if I’d told anyone. What about you? Are you excited for the break?”

Neville freezes and then forces himself to swallow to hide the sudden, unnatural stillness. Unable to come up with an appropriate answer – because he doesn’t imagine that Blaise wants to hear that _no_, no he doesn’t want to go back home, he wants to stay _here_ – Neville simply shrugs and stares at the bladderwort.

It will be nice to see Gran, he thinks, and tries to say it but he can’t get his mouth to open and the words stick in his throat.

It _will _be nice to see her. She’s always at her cheeriest right before Christmas. She’s not _really_ happy, he doesn’t think - he doesn’t think she’s ever really happy anymore – but she smiles more and makes sure the house is properly decorated for both Yule and Christmas. He thinks she’s trying to convince herself that everything can be okay before they’re faced with the proof that everything is _not _and will never be so again.

It will be nice to see her, though. She’ll hug him and he’s not sure but he thinks she’ll probably give him some new plants for his greenhouse. She doesn’t particularly approve of his love of plants but she gifts them to him anyway, especially after one of her episodes when not even a Cheering Solution can convince her to get out bed. An apology, he thinks, for leaving him alone. And while that isn’t what’s going on this time Neville still thinks she might give him a little something, even if it’s just some herbs, to welcome him home.

Plus, she’ll be pleased at how he’s doing in school. He’s managing an Acceptable in everything but Herbology, where he has an Outstanding, and Transfiguration, where he has an Exceeds Expectations but he’s pretty sure that’s only because Professor McGonagall isn’t marking him quite like she should. He’s even getting an Acceptable in Potions! He’s not quite sure how he’s managed that but Professor Snape does seem to appreciate his grasp of herbology in relationship to potions even if he’s useless at brewing any of the potions himself.

But then Christmas will come and they’ll have to go visit Mum and Dad and…

Neville shrinks in on himself at the thought, well aware that his shoulders are now somewhere around his ears and desperately wishes that he was alone. But he isn’t and he’s been too quiet and he can feel Blaise watching him and…

…and he doesn’t want to go visit his parents! He’s a bad son, okay? He’s a pathetic failure and a shame to his house and he _doesn’t want to go_. He doesn’t want to have to sit next to their beds and try to talk to them for hours while they ignore him or, even worse, not ignore him because then they’re kind but they have no idea who he is because they don’t know _anything _anymore and…! And Gran will just get paler and paler and her grip will be so tight on the way down to the floo that he’ll probably have bruises and then when they get home she’ll go to her room and she won’t come out again for who knows how long – it’s usually a couple of days, at least – and then it’ll just be Neville and Uncle Algie.

So no, _no, _he is not looking forward to the holiday but he can’t say that, can he?

“Hey,” Blaise’s voice is soft but Neville flinches anyway. He can’t stop himself. At least he isn’t so clumsy as to nearly fall over this time. Blaise gently knocks their shoulders together, seeming to ignore the reaction though Neville knows he noticed. Blaise notices almost everything. “You’ll have to come over. _Mamma _really wants to meet everyone and she loves having a houseful of people. It gives her an excuse to bake.”

Neville blinks in surprise because he knows that Blaise is well off – well off enough that the Malfoys had considered him an acceptable companion for a young Draco – and sort of just assumed that they had house elves to do their cooking and cleaning. “She b-b-bakes?” he asks, his voice thick and hoarse.

“Yeah. _Babbo _taught her to make pasta when they were courting but she prefers to make cakes and other sweets,” Blaise tells him. “But there’s only so much we can eat before we make ourselves sick, you know? So, she keeps the neighbors well stocked with baked goods. If you come to visit, she’ll probably stuff you like a goose and then roll you out to the solarium to ask your opinion on her roses.” Neville must look as confused as he feels because Blaise just shrugs. “I've mentioned that you’re really into herbology so she’ll probably try to show you every plant in the house and garden. Stick around long enough and eventually she’ll drag you out to Tuscany to see the vineyard.” The other boy rolls his eyes as if the idea of his mother kidnapping his…his friends and dragging them around the world to look at plants is a simple, ordinary thing.

It sounds… nice.

Really, really nice.

“Seriously, though,” Blaise tells him, catching his gaze and holding it. “You’re welcome to drop by whenever.”

“M-m-maybe a-after Chr-christmas?” Neville gets out and doesn’t believe his daring. Gran probably won’t let him. Uncle Algie _definitely _won’t let him and that's what matters because after Christmas Gran will spend the better part of a week in her bed, unmoving and unspeaking. But he wants to believe, even for a minute, that he might get to go visit Blaise’s home. A home that suddenly exists as a busy riot of warmth and life inside his head.

Blaise smiles, easy and bright. “That’d be great.”


	18. Perfectly Respectable (Petunia)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chronologically takes place during the early part of Chapter 17 of Harry Potter and the Greatest Show (still that first week of December-ish) and can read at any point after Chapter 16. 
> 
> This is another one of those chapters that I didn't necessarily mean to write and it just sort of... happened while I was working on Snape's next chapter. We also see a reappearance of one of the Original Characters (two if you count the dog) from Chapter 8 of the Peanut Gallery.

The doorbell chimes at a quarter past four on Friday afternoon just as Petunia is elbow deep in a sink full of soapy water, cleaning up the plethora of dishes needed to get a proper dinner in the oven for Vernon. The poor man has been forced to attend several working dinners this week in the rush to get things done for the end of year reviews and while she’s sure that a place like Grunnings wouldn’t skimp on making sure that their employees were fed a quality of food befitting them, it’s still not a proper, homecooked meal. Regardless, neither restaurants or caterers ever serve enough food for a man of Vernon’s caliber. So tonight he’ll have a proper dinner followed by desert and a drop of cognac for when he gets to sit in front of the telly and put his feet up.

It is moments like this that she misses The Boy. He still hadn’t quite got the knack of making a proper roast but he could clean the dishes acceptably and she does so hate how her fingers get all pruney. He had been much more suited for the gardening than she is. Maybe she will speak to Vernon about hiring someone in the spring so that she’s not forced to crawl around the shrubbery pulling weeds and scratching up her hands.

So sometimes she misses The Boy but then she walks past the cupboard – the cupboard that she hasn’t had to open in _months – _and recalls that even though she is stuck scrubbing browned bits off the cookware and fussing over the rose bushes she also hasn’t had to deal with any of that…that _freakish_ nonsense in months either. Nothing has disappeared, or broken for no reason, or floated across the room. She hasn’t had to deal with schools sending home complaints of The Boy ending up on rooftops. She hasn’t had to deal with The Boy himself, with that unruly mop of hair and that horrible scar and her dead sister’s eyes staring out of his face, reminding her every time she looks that there is an entire group of Freaks out there who don’t think Petunia would ever be good enough to interact with. As if they have any right to judge her!

Shaking the unpleasant thoughts from her head, she removes her apron and lays it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs before she heads for the front door, pausing long enough to check her hair in the hall mirror.

“Yes?” she inquires politely once she’s opened the door, offering the man on the other side a rather empty smile as she subtly studies him.

He’s young, probably nearly a decade younger than she is, with a thick head of brown hair and hazel eyes set in a rather handsome, almost boyish face. Whoever he is, he makes a decent salary. Her keen eyes pick out the details of a sharp, charcoal gray suit beneath the black wool coat that falls past his knees and the gold gleam of a watch on his wrist and a plain, if thick, wedding band on his hand. In fact, at first glance, the only objectional thing about him is the smallish fawn colored dog sitting at his feet, its face nearly as smashed looking as one of Marge’s slobbering bulldogs. At least it seems to be more well behaved than Marge’s beasts, not moving from its master’s side, barking, or otherwise sniffing, scratching, or digging at Petunia’s home. The collar around its neck is an expensive looking thing of braided leather dyed purple, gleaming silver tags visible against the soft gold of its fur.

“Hello, I’m sorry to bother you,” he says right away and Petunia likes that, likes that he doesn’t just assume that she has nothing better to do all day than answer her door. “I’m Martin Jones and my wife and I are looking at purchasing number elven just up the road. I have a few questions about the neighborhood that I hoped you could answer? If you have the time that is.”

Petunia spares him another speculative glance. He seems like the right sort, she decides after a moment, even if he does have a dog. “Of course,” she says with a decisive sort of nod. “I can spare you a few minutes. Would you like to come in?”

“Oh,” the man sounds surprised. “I wasn’t expecting…Would it be alright?” he asks, gesturing helplessly at the dog still sitting next to his well shined shoe tongue lolling out of its mouth as it looks around with dark eyes.

Petunia purses her lips and gives the beast a sharp-eyed look. “It’s trained?”

“Extremely,” the man – Jones, was it? – replies. “My wife wouldn’t tolerate her in the house otherwise. And Essie’s getting on in years. She’ll be perfectly happy to just sit on my feet. Or I can stay out here…”

Petunia sighs and waves away his suggestion. “No, no.” It’s starting to rain after all – barely more than a mist but it’s cold enough out there to make the whole experience miserable. Imogen in number six would harp on her for _weeks _if she just left the poor man on her doorstep instead of inviting him in, dog or no. “Please, come in.”

Jones and his dog follow her into the sitting room and at her gesture he perches on one side of the stuffed cream paisley sofa and, just as he told her, the beast immediately climbs up on top of his shoes and sits there without even an obligatory sniff at the rug.

If Jones and his wife do buy number eleven then she might have to arrange for he and Marge to meet at some point. Just so that Petunia can rub in her face that beasts can, in fact, be trained not to smear their disgusting faces all over her freshly vacuumed rug and dig at her furniture.

“You have a lovely home,” he tells her, taking in the room with an appreciative glance and Petunia feels her general ire deflate a little at the compliment, at having all of her hard work recognized.

“Thank you. Tea?” she asks and he shakes his head.

“Thank you, but no. I wouldn’t want to take up more of your time than necessary.” Her approval of him goes up another notch. So considerate. More than a few of the neighbors could take a page out of his book. She wonders, vaguely, what his wife is like. She’s probably young, just as he is, but Petunia sincerely hopes that the girl has more sense in her head than Charlotte in number three, who can’t even make a proper cup of tea without burning the water and who has more clothes – trashy, scandalous things at that! – than half the neighborhood women put together.

Petunia settles herself into one of the cushioned chairs across from him and offers him something that is almost a smile. “So, what is it that you wished to know?”

“Oh, general stuff mainly. Your impressions of the neighborhood. It seems like a safe enough sort of place but you never know, do you? We are expecting our first and Mary – that’s my wife – wants to make sure that we’re settled in a solid, decent sort of place. Good neighbors, good schools, you know? Do you have children?”

“A son,” she says and gestures to the frames lining the mantle. They probably aren’t very clear from where Jones is sitting but it should be obvious at least that the same three people fill most of them. “He’s away at Smeltings,” she adds proudly even though she misses him dreadfully. Her little Diddykins is growing up so quickly and it tears at her heart to send him away for his schooling. The house is so lonely and empty without him. She feels terribly restless without her child to cater to, to provide for like her parents never quite managed to provide for her. But she wants this for him, too, wants it with a fierceness that consumes her entire heart. Smeltings is a well-regarded school whose students almost all go on to University. Most of their graduates go on to the business world but they boast no few doctors and lawyers amongst their number. Decent, respectable men with decent, respectable jobs who can provide for their families like they should.

“Oh, how grand for him!” Jones tells her, looking away from the picture and giving her a broad smile. “Smart boy, is he?”

“Very,” Petunia smiles more genuinely. “He’s just been offered a place on the wrestling team. Youngest member in decades.”

“You must be very proud,” Jones tells her. “Just the one though?”

“Yes,” Petunia says firmly. She only ever wanted the one. She has only ever wanted the best for her child and she never wanted the inherent risk that comes with having multiple children. Risks of pitting them against each other, risks of favoring one over the other, risks of not being able to provide for them as they should be provided for. No, she has never been willing to risk it. One perfect child is all she’s ever wanted and one perfect child is what she has. “Just the one. We wanted to devote all of our attention to him,” she adds, even though she knows that she doesn’t need to explain herself.

“Sensible,” Jones nods agreeably. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Mary but she has her heart set on two or three. I keep telling her that we’ll start with one and see how things go from there.” They sit in a silence that is equal parts comfortable and awkward for a minute before Jones continues, “But it’s been a good place to raise him? No trouble makers around, doing stuff they shouldn’t?”

“There’s not,” Petunia is quick to assure him, horrified by the very thought. The only blight on Privet Drive had been The Boy and he is _gone_. Where, she doesn’t know or care just as long as he’s not _here_. Hopefully, if she's lucky, The Boy will never be here again. They had done their bit, taken him and given him a place to keep Dudley safe but The Boy has gone, left of his own free will and no one should expect them to take him back after _that_. “The neighborhood is lovely. Dudley – that’s my boy – has such a nice group of friends that he went to primary school with. They’re not perfect,” she says with a little laugh, thinking of the mischief he and Piers had gotten into when they were younger , “Boys will be boys but they’re good kids. We don’t tolerate any of that nonsense around here. We’re normal, sensible people.” Jones is nodding along with her and makes a pleased sort of hum at her declaration. “There’s a group of younger ones as well and I think the Richards over in number seven are thinking about having another baby so there would definitely be more your child’s age,” she adds.

“That would make Mary very happy,” Jones tells her. “I just might have to bring her out to have a look. The house is nice enough,” he hastens to tell her, as if worried that she’ll take his comment as insulting. “But it’s really the people that are important, isn’t it? We just want a nice, respectable place with good, hardworking people.”

“That’s what we were after as well,” Petunia agrees. “My husband, Vernon, works at Grunnings. Been there almost fourteen years,” she adds with a nod of pride, “and rest of the street is the same: we all know how to stick with a job and see it through. What is it that you do?” she can’t resist asking and why shouldn’t she? They don’t want just anyone coming to Privet Drive and the surrounding streets.

“Oh, forgive my manners!” Jones cries out, as if suddenly remembering that he needs to prove himself to the neighborhood as much as it needs to qualify itself for him. “I’m a junior partner at a small legal firm- _Morrison & Jones_. We do mostly corporate law – contracts and telling people where to sign, mostly, but we occasionally dabble in family law.”

Petunia accepts his answer with a smile, settling deeper into her chair. A lawyer and a partner at that! Oh, he would be a feather in the cap of Privet Drive. Mentally, she adjusts his age upwards by a few more years at least. He must just be blessed – or cursed – with one of those faces that never seem to grow up. “How lovely,” she tells him genuinely. “You must take real pride in your work.”

Jones nods. “I do, I do,” he agrees. “Couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else to be honest but that’s enough of that. I’ve taken up too much of your time Mrs…”

“Dursley,” she supplies, realizing quite suddenly that she’d never given the poor man her name. What he must think of her! “Petunia Dursley and my husband is Vernon.”

“Well, Mrs. Dursley, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for taking a moment from your busy afternoon to answer my questions. My Mary will be quite pleased with what you told me, quite pleased. I’ve no doubt that we’ll be back to take a look at the place. Hopefully before someone else realizes what a gem it is and snaps it up!”

“Real estate values are excellent around here,” she tells him seriously and follows him back towards the entrance. He pauses for a moment in front of the cupboard door and switches the dog’s leash – and my goodness, she’d practically forgotten that the animal was even there! She really _must _introduce him to Marge – to his other hand so that he can extend his recently emptied hand towards her. She takes it automatically but instead of shaking it he raises it to his lips and brushes a chaste, barely there kiss over her knuckles as he bows over it like some sort of nobility. It’s perfectly proper but Petunia can feel her cheeks heating anyway.

“Well then we’ll have to be quick!” Jones says cheerfully. “Thank you, again.”

“Oh, it was no trouble,” Petunia waves away his thanks even though they make her feel all warm and puffed up like a balloon. “Was there anything else?”

“No,” Jones says with a wide smile. “I found out everything I needed.”

“Well, good luck with the house,” she tells him as opens the front door and steps out onto the stoop. “I hope it works for you. Do bring by your wife and say hello if it does! Vernon and I would be delighted to introduce you to the neighbors.”

A few more pleasantries and then Jones is off down the walk in the direction of number eleven, that dog of his trotting calmly at his heel. Petunia watches him go for several minutes before she returns to the house and shuts the door behind her.

Such a considerate young man, very respectable and a lawyer to boot! If she hurries with the dishes, she’ll have just enough time to call and tell Imogen all about him before Vernon arrives home for dinner.

Perfect, she thinks as she returns to the kitchen. Absolutely perfect.


	19. The Professor (Snape)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chronologically takes place towards the end of Chapter 17 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show" and can be read at any point after that.

Normally after seeing all the little sniveling miscreants onto the train and headed back home to celebrate the holidays with their families Severus might take a stroll around the village and its delightful student-free atmosphere. He’d maybe spend an hour browsing at the bookshop, maybe stop by The Three Broomsticks for a non-Hogwarts lunch but most certainly for a drink.

Because he can.

In the middle of the fucking day.

But alas, not this time.

Today he has other business to attend to.

And while getting a drink at The Three Broomsticks and reading in peace is certainly a delightful way to spend the afternoon, Severus is quite certain that what he has planned will be more fun – and if not more fun than at the very least distinctly more satisfying.

So, it is with a great deal more excitement than usual – not that anyone can tell, the unobservant imbeciles – that he stands on the platform in Hogsmeade and watches, hands clasped behind his back as the train slowly ticks by and carries the hyped up little dunderheads away. Miss Abbott waves furiously as they go past and Severus refuses to even let his mouth twitch at the cheerful display even as he’s baffled by it. _His _students barely express any sort of friendly sentiment at the sight of him. A student of a different house greeting him with smiles and cheerful welcome?

Inwardly, Severus scoffs. _Hufflepuffs._

That one is going to be trouble though, he just knows it.

The whole bloody group of them will, if he’s being honest. Childhood friendships can be fickle things – he would know, he thinks mockingly as the train disappears around the bend – but if theirs holds they will be a force to be reckoned with when they’re older. Of course, they’re probably going to turn him gray before then.

Little bastards.

And, well, if the thought comes out more fondly than intended absolutely no one is going to know.

* * *

Eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning in London is _busy_. Severus usually forgets how busy until he has to brave the imbecilic masses. He can’t even scare them properly, not without drawing too much attention, and is forced to endure the abominable press of warmth and noise and _people _as he opens the door and steps into a little café. It’s decidedly bright and cheery and he bites back a reflexive sneer at the gleaming white and stainless surfaces and the softly patterned wallpaper on the side walls that put him in mind of the single teacup his ma had kept in a box on the top shelf in the back of the broom cupboard: one of the few things she had brought from home when she eloped with Tobias.

At least it smells good, he allows as the rich scents of buttery pastry, coffee, chocolate, and the faint vanilla-y wisp of icing wash over him.

At a small table in the back, squeezed into the corner around the edge of the counter from the register is the man he’s come to see. He’s been considerate and left the chair against the wall with a clear view of the rest of the cafe for Severus so Severus is polite and trips the rudimentary wards a few tables out instead of bypassing them entirely. At the table, his former student twitches at the sensation and turns.

“Professor,” he greets with a grin, settling back into his chair when Snape waves him off.

“Mr. Jones, I do believe I have not been your professor for quite some time,” he points out as he takes his own seat. He spares a glance for the little fawn colored pug sitting serenely on the man’s feet under the table, tongue lolling out of her mouth. “Essie,” he greets the man’s familiar solemnly. She doesn’t move but her tail wags enthusiastically, the little curl of it whipping against the side of her master’s trouser leg and leaving a fine smattering of pale fur around the hemline. Severus feels his mouth curl into something resembling a smile and here, buried deep in muggle London and far away from Hogwarts, he allows it.

“Sorry sir,” Jones apologizes breezily. “You’ll always be the professor to me.” He doesn’t sound apologetic at all. Severus sighs. The impertinence. “I wasn’t sure if you would be hungry yet so I just got us a pot of tea.”

“Acceptable,” Snape rumbles as the full bodied, almost smokey, malty notes of a particularly good Assam tickle at his nose. If he were alone, he might have opted for the largest cup of coffee they served and a couple slices of the chocolate babka he can see in the display case but a good cup of tea and a piece of shortbread isn’t exactly a hardship. With a subtle flick of his wrist as he reaches for the tea he casts a silent _muffliato _and feels the telltale pressure along his inner ears as the magic takes hold. “What have you found?”

His question is met with a quiet, heavy “ah”, the young man’s face is suddenly serious and looking a fair bit older than his twenty-four years as he spreads his hand across the top of the manilla envelope sitting innocuously on the table in front of him.

Martin Jones had been one of his first students, a bright eyed and cautious third year when Severus had first started teaching back in 1981. He had also been one of the rare – though not nearly as rare as people seem to think – muggleborn Slytherins. That first year of teaching had been especially miserable. Severus had been no more than two or three years older than his oldest students, a half-blood from a poor muggle raised background, who had been bullied and assaulted off and on through the entirety of his Hogwarts’ education – a legacy that no one had been keen on letting him forget. Though Horace had stayed on to ostensibly oversee the transition the bloated old walrus has always been particularly useless and Severus had had to wrestle control of the Slytherins by any means necessary - up to and including the presence of the gleaming Dark Mark on his arm. He had been forced to duel more than one of the sixth and seventh years, frequently more than one at a time, and in one notable instance had been forced to beat Edward Jugson into a bloody pulp to keep the little bastard from snapping Severus’ wand.

And then the Dark Lord had gone after the Potters, had murdered his childhood tormentor and his childhood friend and left their baby an orphan all in one fell swoop. Not to mention gotten himself bloody blown into countless little pieces. When Severus had been returned to the school after a week in an Azkaban cell and all but ordered by the Ministry and Albus both to retake his teaching position so that they could keep an eye on him he had only had to fight all the harder for control and order. Carving out a system and space – both metaphorical and literal – for the forgotten and oft abused muggleborns and half bloods sorted into the snake pit had given him something to focus on besides whether tonight would be the night he finally upended any number of poisons into the nearest bottle of alcohol and simply ended his own pathetic existence.

He hadn’t been able to do much for the handful of muggle born and/or raised students in the first few years but by the time Jones had graduated Severus’ control of Slytherin house was all but absolute and he’d built his own system, piggybacking on Horace’s network and his own connections within the Death Eater and Potions communities, to help ensure that his students could fit in and truly be part of the magical world, falling victim to none of the pitfalls that so frequently awaited those thrown into an entirely new society at the age of elven.

Severus has known Martin Jones since he was thirteen years old, had been responsible for overseeing his traditional studies as well as educating him about the customs of the world he now lived in. Ultimately, he had not only helped the man connect with a freshly licensed half blood solicitor who would become his business partner but had always made use of their services quite a few times in the years since.

He has never seen the younger man look like this.

“I want you to know, before we start, that you have my oath that I am the only one who has been privy to this information,” he tells him feverently, so sincere that Snape can feel it brushing up against the nebulous edges of his own mind. “Not even James knows what’s in here,” Jones continues, “though he drew up the paperwork and left the names for me to fill in. As soon as I realized who Miss Evans is, I made sure to keep all the information either secured on my person or locked in my warded safe at home.” Jones gives him a serious look. “Once we are done, I fully expect you to obliviate me.”

Severus raises an eyebrow.

“There are a lot of people who would want to get their hands on some of this information,” Jones presses on, “and if you’re looking into it there are probably even more than I realize. If you’re about to do what I think you are…” he trails off and gives his head a little shake, jaw tight. “My occlumency is decent sir but it’s not _that _good. Best if you just take it. Safer. For both of you.”

Severus had been intending to regardless but it’s a relief that Jones is asking him to. Modifying the memories of people without their consent is definitely possible, requiring minimal increased effort on his part, but it’s the sort of thing that leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Especially when he’s forced to do it to someone he respects. Someone who is _his_.

It’s also worrisome. He has a decent idea of what the notes inside the folder say. “_They kept me in the cupboard under the stairs”_, he remembers Harry saying, the quiet confession echoing around and around his skull at the most inopportune moments since that night in his office. “_I was expected to lay in there and pretend I didn’t exist. If I made any noise then I didn’t get any food.” _Severus hopes that the request for obliviation is fueled by the fact that this is information about Harry bloody Potter. He hopes that Jones is asking for his memory to be modified because he is smart enough to fill in all the pieces – quite literally, given the comment the younger man had made regarding filling in the paperwork – and begin to grasp the scope of the potential fallout from what is happening here today. Yet, Severus can’t help but feel a rush of apprehension at the thought that there might be _more_. Worrisome, because the only other time Jones had felt the need to ask for the memory charm had been when he’d turned up evidence that the father of one of his Slytherins had been pimping out his eleven-year-old daughter in exchange for his next high. Miss Hart is in her fifth year now and quite enthusiastic about going on to earn a charms mastery after she graduates. If she keeps her grades up, he’ll be happy to put her in touch with a Charms Master in France who owes him a favor. Now she lives with an aunt when not at Hogwarts, her father having apparently gone to get booze and cigarettes four years ago and simply vanished off of the face of the earth.

A tragedy, really.

Better for everyone involved if Jones doesn’t remember that someone – that Severus – would have had cause to want the man gone.

“I will,” Severus promises and Jones relaxes just a little bit.

“Good,” the younger man says and takes a drink of his tea. “Then we can get started.”

* * *

Privet Drive is even more ghastly than Jones had described.

Severus tucks the cigarette between his lips and inhales slowly, grounding himself in the familiarity of the action as he stares up the street. Each house is the same as the next, one right after the other. The same brick and the same siding in the same washed out shade of brown. The same dark door, the same peak to the roof, the same square of lawn in the front, the same hedges underneath the front windows, and drives are all laid exactly the same. In fact, the only possible differences between the houses are in their choice of landscaping and in the vehicles sitting in the driveways. The former, of course, is rendered moot by the slowly tightening grasp of winter and the latter is all but washed away by the fact that they all seem to have chosen vehicles of similar sizes, makes, and colors.

Camazotz is a street in Surrey.

A shiver of distaste sneaks up his spine and Severus shoves the ice of his occlumency into place to keep from snarling like a cornered animal.

He is a being of magic, of wild chaos as surely present in death and darkness as it is in life and light. The rigid control that the muggles have exerted over this suburban nightmare is unsettling in a way that little else in his life has ever managed.

He doesn’t like it.

He doesn’t like it at all.

Severus exhales sharply and grounds out his cigarette with the heel of his boot, well aware that he’s being carefully scrutinized from behind a handful of curtains. Best to get this over with. Once it is done, he will hopefully never have to step foot in this miserable hellscape again. If he does, and there is any kindness or justice left in this miserable world, he will get to light it all on fire.

The wards around Number Four are a paradoxical disaster.

They are strong, of course. Any warding based in blood is going to be strong but their strength is illusionary. Inside the form of them their substance is washed out and tattered. They are starved, plain and simple, so hungry that they’re brittle and fading before his eyes. One tap in the right place would probably bring the whole thing tumbling down, sharp like broken glass and finer than grains of sand. They cover the house but they don’t surround it. They haven’t been laid around the perimeter or even etched into the foundation and the walls. A person then. Harry, obviously, with a link to his aunt so that her attachment to the place anchors them even when Harry leaves. Even with the boy being away at Hogwarts for months they should be stretched but holding strong. Instead they’re rotting from the inside out.

Just how ineffectual they really are is made apparent as Severus strides smartly up the walk. Halfway between the street and the door the wards try to stop him. It’s a bit like being caught in the sweep of a net. There is some give and take but it traps and ensnares, the wards tangling tighter around their victim the more they try to break free.

Or that is how it is supposed to be.

But Salazar forbid Albus ensure that the magics protecting the keystone of his vision of the magical world be cared for properly.

So no, the wards do not do their bloody job and no wonder.

Instead, it’s a bit like catching a loose thread of his robes on the rough stones of the castle walls when he turns a corner too sharply. A catch, a pull, on one single spot – the ashen remains of his Dark Mark in this case, the withered magic tugging weakly at the inner lines of the skull’s mouth – that proves so useless at holding him back that he barely even deigns to notice it. It certainly doesn’t slow him down or cause his stride to falter.

He can barely even see the lines of them, sickly gray and feeble. These blood wards have the potential to be all but impenetrable to someone who might harm Harry but instead they possess less tensile strength than a strand of Albus’ ridiculous beard.

Pathetic.

He raps on the door.

It has been seventeen years since he last saw Petunia Evans but he would recognize the sour faced woman who answers no matter how many years have passed.

The same cannot be said for her. If she had recognized him, she would have started screaming the house down. Instead she lets her gaze flicker over him, taking him in before offering him a smile that – wonder of wonders – actually borders on genuine and politely inquires, “May I help you?”

It’s the clothes.

Severus is not what one would call handsome – he’s an ugly, miserable bastard and he knows it – but thanks to Lucius he has refined the ability to force those around him to see him, to define him by what he wears and how he moves, to create an entire person out nothing more than lengths of cloth and the way he stands. He can be the terrifying potions master who appears at least a decade older than this true age or the confident, unassuming young professor who needs to talk to parents about the strange things their children can do. He can be the strict, no nonsense potioneer who is known the world over for brilliant, unorthodox insights and scathing judgement of his colleagues or just another bloke who works too hard for too little and pisses it all away on cheep beer while he smokes his way into an early grave.

Today he is in slim cut black trousers that emphasize the length of his legs and strain almost imperceptibly around muscled thighs. The severe lines of the matching black jacket calls attention to the breadth of his shoulders and the gloves on his hand showcase the long, elegant lines of fingers while hiding the calluses and stains on his hands. Bereft of a day spent over a potion – or a room full of potions of dubious quality – his hair gleams and only a few well-placed sticking charms keep it from coming out of the tight braid he’s woven it into, giving him the illusion of short hair and exposing the line of his jaw and the jut of his cheekbones. Beneath the suit jacket the shock of a brilliant, royal blue shirt turns his skin from sallow to alabaster and almost translucent, especially at the hollow of his throat.

It is, quite honestly, as close to handsome as he’ll ever get and despite the simplicity of the outfit, he knows that what he’s wearing likely cost nearly as much as whatever vehicle normally sits in the Dursleys’ drive. He hasn’t bothered with a proper coat or even a scarf – or rather he has, but they’re currently shrunk down and sitting in his trouser pocket – and that alone will ensure that the neighbors talk, never mind that he’s spent the better part of a quarter of an hour standing on the walk and smoking. Petunia has certainly been watching – she’d answered the door just a hair too quickly for her to not have been – but he lets her look her fill and draw her conclusions before he drawls, “Going to leave me out in the cold, Tuney? I thought your mam taught you better manners than that.”

Severus has worked long and hard to refine his voice, to retrain himself to speak in clear, clipped tones and drive every bit of the poor, rough midland town he had grown up in from his speech. He has practiced over and over until his control is perfect, until even when surprised out of a dead sleep he speaks with an exactness that impresses even Lucius. He lets a little of that control slip now. Not much, but enough. Enough to roughen the edges of his words, enough to give them familiar edge that they had both grown up hearing, that Petunia has tried to train out of her voice, that Lily had spoken with right up to the night she died.

That, more than anything, gets Petunia’s attention.

“You!” It is somehow both a whisper and shout at the same time and Severus let’s his lips curl up in a sneering sort of grin, let’s the huff of laughter rumble around in his chest.

Petunia tries to slam the door in his face.

He stops it.

With his foot, unfortunately. The wards might be weaker than spun sugar but he has no doubt that some alarm will ring somewhere – be at the ministry or the headmaster’s office or, Salazar forbid, _both _\- if any significant magic is performed in the house. A freezing charm probably wouldn’t set things off but he’ll err on the side of caution. He’ll be taking memories before the hour is gone and he’d rather not have to rush. Merlin knows Petunia is enough of a mess as is without him mucking through her petty little mind like a pig burrowing for truffles.

“Invite me in, Tuney,” he tells her and she sets her jaw, eyes narrowing as she shakes her head.

“No! I won’t have one of you freaks in my house! I want nothing to do with you!”

“The feeling is mutual,” he assures her dryly. “Let me in.” She tries to slam the door again but, unsurprisingly, his booted foot is still in the way. Thank Merlin for reinforced dragonhide. “Let me in or I will start transfiguring your rose bushes into palm trees and your lawn into sand. My time is limited and I am in desperate need of vacation.”

As he’d known it would, the threat of such obvious strangeness where people can _see _is enough to make her hastily step back. “Get in,” she hisses spitefully and he sweeps past her and straight into hell.

Despite the eye burning peach and gold paisley of the furniture and the number of picture frames and knick-knacks, little things that one might pick up on holiday to show off one’s travels, that line the bookshelves and mantle and the little table in the hall the interior of Number Four is stark and rather barren feeling. It is cold, rigid and controlled with the artificial lemon scent of household cleaners hanging so thickly in the air that Severus has to force himself not to sneeze.

“I am here to speak about your nephew.”

“He’s not here,” Petunia says instantly. “The ungrateful freak just got up and left one day. He never came back and good riddance! I don’t care what that… that _man _says! It’s not good for my Dudley to have one of _you people _in his home!”

“Yes, I do imagine watching another child starve to death could be quite upsetting,” Severus murmurs, glancing away from his study of the gallery of Petunia and her family. The woman’s face pales gratifyingly at his words. “But you never thought of Harry as a child, did you?”

“He’s _not_,” she hisses, hands clenched so tightly at her side that he expects blood to start dripping from her fingers at any moment. “That boy is an abomination just like his freakish parents – a blight on the good, normal people of this world!”

He raises an eyebrow high enough that it nearly disappears into his hair. “People like you?”

Severus would never call himself a good person. That ship sailed a long, long time ago and there’s no calling it back even if he wanted to but the idea of _Tuney _being a good person is equally laughable. Lily had been the only good amongst the three of them, a rose to their thistle.

Petunia bristles. “I am a _respectable woman_,” she snarls. “I pulled myself out of that…that _pit_! I did, by myself, without any freakish nonsense swooping in to save me. I am a good wife, a good mother – an upstanding, hardworking, _normal _member of society!”

“Perfectly normal,” he sneers. “Absolutely mundane. You and Tobias are the real gold standard for humanity.”

No wonder there are wizards who want to wipe muggles off of the face of the earth. He can’t even say that he doesn’t understand their desire – because he does, oh Merlin, he does and that is a stain that he will never be free of – but he’s not idiotic enough to judge every muggle based upon the likes of Petunia and Tobias, just as he does not judge the entire wixen population by Potter and Black.

Or, Salazar save him, Bellatrix.

Muggle or magical it doesn’t matter.

Monsters are inevitable.

“I resolved when I had to take the boy in that I’d try and make him normal, that I wouldn’t let that nonsense take root in my house!” Tuney snaps back. “But it was too late. He’s a… a freak. Just like you. He’ll never be a normal child.”

“No, he won’t, and it is a good thing too. His _freakishness_ is the only reason he survived your respectable care. Tell me truly, how long would it have taken you to notice if he died?” he demands, feeling his stomach turn over at the thought. It’s a thought that won’t go away, that keeps him awake at night. It’s a thought, a reality that came much too close to manifesting, and the knowledge of that drives him out of his mind in the middle of the night when there’s no place to hide from his thoughts. “An hour? A day? Until the scent of his rotting corpse turned your stomach? Would you have bothered to even bury him or would he have been thrown out with the trash? Or would you not have bothered at all and simply left his bones on the cupboard floor?” He jabs a finger at the door leading to the cupboard under the stairs, so angry that even with the occlumency he’s shaking. “Lily’s son, Tuney,” he adds, absolutely breathless with fury. “That boy is _Lily’s son_!”

“Lily is dead!” Petunia screams back. “She and that no good husband of hers! They’re dead and gone and good riddance! One less danger in the world to _my _boy, to _my _son!” She beats on her chest with the flat of her hand so hard that the pearls around her neck bounce. “If the boy possessed any decency he would have died to. I didn’t want the sniveling little freak then and I don’t want him now! I won’t take him back,” she declares, the long length of her face mottled with fury. “I won’t!”

Severus laughs, long and cold and so fucking sharp that Tuney’s head snaps back as sure as if he had slapped her. “Whatever gave you the idea that I would allow Harry back in your care?”

Petunia blinks, dazed. “But aren’t you…?”

From his pocket he takes a small packet of papers, undoing the shrinking charm with the slightest pull of his own magic. He’s left with a neat stack, the muggle documents on top starkly white against the creamy toned parchment beneath. He holds it out between them and she takes them almost unthinking.

“Sign them,” he orders, and offers her a pen, which she also takes in the slow, unsure movements of someone whose attention is elsewhere. Indeed, it is on the papers clutched greedily in her hands, her narrowed eyes darting back and forth as she reads.

“Guardianship papers? But who…?” Her eyes widen as she finds the name. “You?” she scoffs loudly. “You would be his guardian?”

“I already _am _his guardian,” he resists the urge to snarl, barely, drawing on the strength of his occlumency to freeze his voice and keep it level, cold and unfeeling. “This is tying up the technicalities.”

Petunia makes a derisive noise deep in her throat and he can’t help but agree with the spirit of the sentiment because really, who wants a bitter, depressed, occasionally suicidal, and all-around nasty person to be their guardian? He is a legitimate criminal, though he’s never actually been tried and sentenced. Not officially, anyway. Still, his respect of the law has always been nonexistent and his opinion on the generally accepted ideas of good and evil is not much better. But he’s not going to let a child starve to death in the dark, which is apparently the bar that people are setting these days.

“And the protection that he provides?” the spiteful bitch has the nerve to ask, as if she has not spent the last several minutes refusing to have anything to do with Harry. The urge to throttle her is so strong that he can feel his fingers twitch, unconsciously anticipating how it would feel to just wrap his hands around her throat and _squeeze_.

Alas, not today.

“I will only say this once so listen very closely,” he says instead. “You have a choice. Keeping guardianship of Harry will provide you limited protection against the Dark Lord – a wizard who has not been seen or heard of in a decade and is assumed to be dead. _Or_ you can sign those papers and be protected from me.”

“From_ you_?” The disdainful, disgusted look that she gives him is achingly familiar. He smiles. It’s not a nice smile. It’s the smile he wore when the Dark Lord branded the Dark Mark into his arm, sharp and pleased and full of anticipation.

“I will slit the throats of everyone living in this house and burn it to the ground before I let Harry return here. Try me, Tuney,” he challenges, feeling the searing heat of his anger climbing up his spine to lick at the prison he has encased it in. “You wouldn’t be my first murder. You wouldn’t even be my first murder in defense of a student.”

“You’re a monster,” she whispers hoarsely, her face the color of sour milk.

“Yes,” Severus agrees calmly. “I am, aren’t I? And I know where you live and where your son sleeps.”

Petunia signs the papers, one right after the other.

“Good choice,” he allows dryly as he gathers them up. “Now there’s one more thing…”

“What? I already did what you want! Just go…”

“_Obliviate.”_

Erasing the specifics of the last half hour is easier than breathing. He doesn’t take everything, just the details. His name, his face, the specifics of their conversation. He leaves the knowledge that a wizard came and that she signed away all legal right to her nephew. He leaves the stench of her fear, rank and roiling, sunk deep into her mind with hooks that would be agonizing to tear free. He leaves her disgust and the exhilarating rush of her relief, her satisfaction at being done with The Boy once and for all.

It takes but a moment and she is dazed when he is done, eyes unfocused and blinking. He removes another stack of papers, this once encased in the unassuming folds of a manilla folder, and tosses it to the coffee table. The _snap _of it hitting the glass top draws her attention and a single photo – muggle, not magical – spills partially out.

“Your husband is coercing his secretary into sleeping with him. A copy of this report has been delivered to his boss and to the local constable since Vernon has a bit of a temper,” he tells her, pausing at the front door.

“He wouldn’t…” Her voice is weak, softer than he’s ever heard.

“Remind me Tuney,” he asks without turning to look at her, “how did the two of you meet?”

Petunia is silent as he steps out of her home and shuts the door behind him.

As luck would have it the man in question has just arrived home, speaking loudly with his son as they gather the beady eyed whale’s luggage from the boot of the car. He lets his lip curl upward in a smile that he knows looks satisfied and, legal documents safely in his pocket, he swaggers off the front stoop and down the walk toward the drive.

“Dad! Dad, who’s that? Why was he in our house?”

Petunia’s bloated spawn is staring at him, pointing and jabbing his finger in Severus’ direction and Severus smiles. It’s not a nice smile.

“Vernon Dursley?” he asks as he approaches and the man squares his shoulders and puffs up threateningly, his face already an alarming shade of red. It’s ridiculous. He’d compare the man to one of Lucius’ demented peacocks but that would be an insult to the peacocks.

“And just who are you?” Petunia’s husband demands in return.

Severus just smiles and makes use of the only valuable lesson Tobias ever taught him: he curls his fingers into a fist, folds his thumb tightly across the outside, and punches the self-important pig right in the face. Once, twice, three times until he feels the heat of blood on his knuckles and feels the crunch of the man’s nose breaking.

By the time her son’s screams and husband’s bellows have drawn Petunia and a fair number of their neighbors out of their respective houses, Severus is back in London.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains blatant reference to _A Wrinkle in Time_ by Madeleine L'Engle, which was originally published in 1962. Bibliophile Snape almost certainly has multiple copies, including a tattered, coverless, tea stained edition that he rescued from the rubbish bin at a secondhand shop. 
> 
> Also, a shout out to SaerM, whose comment on chapter 8 regarding Snape's superhero name inspired the title of this chapter!


	20. A Whole New Reality (Quirrell/Voldemort)

He sleeps the entire night through for the first time in months and the next morning he doesn’t puke over the side of the bed. He doesn’t stumble as he goes to the loo. There’s enough strength in his hands to grip the washcloth and draw it over his aching limbs. He still takes his potions but they are not as imminently necessary – it is no longer a race between getting them in his bloodstream and accidentally cracking his skull open on the vanity top because he collapsed. He even manages to get dressed without having to pause and take breaks. And, perhaps most importantly, for the first time since September, Quirinus eats breakfast and doesn’t throw it up.

Granted, it’s nothing more than two triangles of toast – _two!_ – with a scraping of butter and two cups of earl grey but it feels like a feast. He’s so full when he swallows the last of it that for a solid twenty minutes he does nothing but recline in his chair, head lolled back against the cushions, absolutely drunk on the sensation of actual food sitting in his stomach.

[_Amazing_]

“It is, isn’t it?” he slurs against the throw blanket tossed over the back of the chair. He has no idea what happened last night.

Wait.

No.

That’s a lie.

He remembers answering the door and seeing Harry Potter on the other side. He remembers Potter coming into the office and then… something. The boy had said something, for a certain value of the word _said_. Hissed it really. He remembers a brief, lightning fast moment of sheer unadulterated _panic_, of fear and rage and then… then between one breath and the next he had been shoved to the side in his own head. And not just shoved to the side but pushed back, pushed back and buried so deep in this space that they share that the rest of the evening had felt like watching something happen in the next room via a hole the size of a quill tip located in a very thick door.

[_Parseltongue]_

“W-what?”

[_The boy is a parselmouth Like me]_

Quirinus blinks. His Master’s ability to speak with snakes is well known. So also, is the knowledge that he can do so only because he is of Slytherin’s line. Supposedly the _last _of Slytherin’s line. There are other parselmouths in the world but not in Europe, certainly not in Britain. Not many, of course, all of them exceedingly rare and those that exist - in India, in Africa, in pockets of the Amazon - they certainly are not human. Not really. They are more human than a centaur but less human than a Veela, which is definitely not human enough for Britain.

Harry Potter on the other hand, is human. Or at least human enough that not even Britain is going to kick up a fuss about it. Which means…

“Oh.”

The implications are a little staggering if he stops to think about it. He’s really rather grateful that he’s already sitting down, actually.

[_Quite]_

So, Potter can talk to snakes and is, somehow, descended from Slytherin as well. And he had known that Quirinus…

No.

He had known that the Dark Lord could also speak to snakes.

More importantly, he had known that the Dark Lord is in Quirinus.

_He had_ _known that the Dark Lord is in Quirinus._

_“It is not you that I wish to speak with.”_

He had known that the Dark Lord is in Quirinus and had…what? Talked with him? The memories of last night are distant but he recalls a struggle. He remembers the way flesh felt giving way beneath his teeth, remembers clutching so tightly at Potter’s face that he wouldn’t be surprised if the boy is sporting bruises this morning.

That could be bad, if someone decided to ask questions about why Harry Potter is sporting bruises shaped like a man’s handprint on each side of his face. Very, very bad. Highly detrimental. Masterly disastrous. Hugely…

[_He is fine He is strong]_

Quirinus blinks once, long and slow at the obvious delight welling up inside of his head like a cauldron bubbling over. It washes over him, carrying his worries away until he’s buoyed up in its sticky sweet warmth. Distantly he knows he’s still worried, he can feel his mind ticking over the probabilities of having to run, of having to get his master far away from here to keep him safe. Distantly, he’s vaguely annoyed that he can hardly feel his own emotions anymore. Mostly, though, he’s too busy floating in this odd river of glee, feeling languid and golden inside of his own skin as he lounges in the chair.

He hasn’t felt this good in ages.

He hasn’t felt this good _ever._

It’s not just that he doesn’t hurt (because he still does, just a little) or that he’s suddenly stronger than ten regular men (he’s not) or even that he miraculously feels like normal (this could never be considered normal) but that he feels so much _more. _It’s not just feeling better it’s…

It’s the initial burst of orgasm, back bowing and blinding. It’s the lazy haze that follows, the bone deep satisfaction and contentment of feeling sheets and warm flesh drag at still sensitized skin. It’s the gasping sensation of filling his lungs full of fresh, clean air when he has gone far too long without. It’s the feeling of hot cocoa sliding down his throat and curling through his gut when he’s too cold to feel anything but the beat of his heart. It’s the sensation of a warm fire and a good book, of looking across the table and meeting someone’s eye and seeing genuine pleasure there. It’s the heat of a summer sun against his upturned face.

It’s everything and nothing.

Quirinus shuts his eyes and lets his face press more firmly into the blanket on the back of the chair, feels the flutter of his lashes against the arch of his cheek.

In, two, three, four.

Out, six, seven, eight.

He cycles through several deliberate breaths more out of habit than any actual need. A vain attempt to get himself under control, to figure out what happened…

[_Harry_]

His master’s answer is more than words, more than the deep, rumbling thrum that surrounds the boy’s name. It’s the sight of his fingers, shaking and weak, steadied by a smaller hand as they clasp a vial filled with an unmistakable pearlescent liquid. It’s watching that hand help his raise that vial to his lips.

Unicorn blood might look like liquid starlight but it tastes like the sun, warm and burning and _vital_.

“_Would you stop fighting me? I’m trying to help you!”_

If his master’s voice had been a rumble, the memory of Potter’s voice is a roar in his head. Except it’s not just his voice, his perfectly average, slightly squeaking eleven-year-old voice. It’s every strand of magic woven into Hogwarts’ walls screaming. It’s standing beneath a thousand waterfalls. It’s the sound of a hundred mountain ranges collapsing all at once. It’s the birth of a star and the death of a galaxy. It’s the sound of all his blood rushing through his veins.

It’s everything and nothing.

“I d-don’t understand,” he whispers against the soft tangle of cashmere and he doesn’t but he also knows the words are true. He _knows _it in a way he cannot articulate or fully comprehend. He _knows_, better than he knows his own heart and mind, he knows. Harry Potter wants to help them. Harry Potter _has _helped them, has saved Quirinus from killing a unicorn and suffering whatever price that would enact upon his head, has given his master enough strength that he can speak again, so that once again Quirinus can feel the strength of Lord Voldemort humming like the air after a lightning strike.

He doesn’t understand but he knows that he owes the boy a debt all the same. A debt larger and more far reaching than his own life. A debt that he is not certain he will ever be able to fully understand, let alone repay.

[_Mine_]

The thought is but a whisper, a single world that hangs crystalline and clear at the center of Quirinus’ mind: a single drop hitting the surface of a pond and sending ripples flowing across its surface.

[_Ally]_

“Ally?” he repeats and if the implications of Potter being a second living descendent of Salazar Slytherin had been enough to make him dizzy, the thought of him being an _ally _to his master, to the Dark Lord who had murdered his parents, who had tried to slaughter him in his crib is…is…

He lets out a pained sound that may be a laugh or it may be a sob, he’s really not quite sure. It is not just an improbable idea but an impossible one, a fantastical one. It’s something so wild and absurd that it shouldn’t even exist in dreams. If it is true, even a little bit, even a single, tiny, miniscule bit – and it must be true, _it must_, because he can still taste the sunburst of unicorn blood on his tongue, because he can speak and think and eat and move – then the world he opened his eyes to today is utterly different from the world he opened his eyes to yesterday. A whole new reality.

And yet.

The idea of the Boy Who Lived serving the Dark Lord is beyond comprehension.

[_No_]

“N-no?” Quirinus stutters out, confused. Hadn’t his master just said that Potter would join in service of him? Isn’t Quirinus’ own existence this morning proof of such service?

[_He does not serve He assists He wishes to]_

Quirinus doesn’t understand but it is not necessary for him to understand, only to serve. Only to obey.

“Y-yes, m-master.”

And then, so quietly in the distant corner of his skull, an almost imperceptible echo that rings off of his bones, a thought that he suspects he is not supposed to hear:

[_You have seen a world in which Lord Voldemort has no equal Now we will see a world in which he does]_

Wisely, Quirinus does not comment.

No, but he will watch. And he will serve.

Always.


	21. To Hope (Dumbledore)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be read at any point after Chapter 18 of "Harry Potter and the Greatest Show". Chronologically takes place on Christmas Eve, which is towards the middle of Chapter 19.

The cloak is mocking him.

Lying across the center of his desk it’s a shifting, pearlescent shine in the middle of his office and it is mocking him.

For over ten years Albus has had it in his possession and while he won’t deny that it has proved exceptionally useful more than once that is not why he is reluctant to give it up. Not really.

No, he is simply loath to give up one of the Deathly Hallows that he has spent so long searching for. Now that he has it, he doesn’t know if he can bring himself to part with something that he and Gellert had dreamed of, that they had discussed and theorized over as they lay tangled in rough cotton sheets with his cold toes pressed to the warmth of Gellert’s calves. He doesn’t know if he can give it away – give it _back_ – when every time he holds it in his hands he can feel the tip of Gellert’s chin digging into his chest, feel the silken shock of his white-blonde hair beneath his hands, feel the other man’s finger drawing the symbol at the base of his throat.

_Cloak. Stone. Wand._

Can feel the kiss, so achingly gentle, that Gellert would press over it when he was done.

It is one of the greatest magical accomplishments of all time, an artifact just as awe inspiring – if not more so – than Excalibur, the Mirror of Erised, or even the Sorcerer’s Stone itself. And it is one of Hallows, he is sure of it: _the_ Cloak of Invisibility, supposedly a piece torn from the cloak of Death itself. From what Albus can tell it is most likely a piece of lethifold skin and… something else.

Over a decade of study and he is no closer to figuring out how the cloak had been formed and how it works now than he had been ten years ago. At first, he had lamented his failure and resented his lack of mage sight and the insight such a gift might have given him. Because surely if he could _see _and _feel_ the magics that it was composed of he would be able to unwind them, to figure them out. There had been many times in the first few years when he had nearly taken it to Severus to see if the younger man could use his gift to offer any useful insight but he had always held back. While Severus might already possess some familiarity with the object from his years of following James around Albus ultimately hadn’t thought the knowledge the younger man might give him worth the inevitable bouts of raging jealousy that would follow. It is hard enough for the poor boy to walk the line on a good day and Albus’ curiosity has never been a good enough reason for pushing him over the edge, especially not when he has seen the truth of what waits in the pit at the bottom of such a fall.

He had been angry, briefly, at his inability to truly unravel and understand the cloak but it had quickly faded into acceptance. He has long since laid aside the foolish dreams of conquering such magics – of recreating them – recognizing the ambition for what it is: hubris, pure and simple. The sort of thing that leads straight to corruption and destruction.

He knows the lure of such things, knows how easy it is to be consumed by them. He will not walk that path again. The cost is too high.

No, he has always intended to give the cloak back to young Harry and for quite some time intended to that moment to be now though he will not lie to himself. He has had some misgivings in the past months. Harry Potter is not quite what he had expected. The boy is not quite what Albus thought he would be, given the circumstances. Not quite what he _needs_ to him to be, if he’s being honest. He has been cautious since Harry’s arrival at Hogwarts, more circumspect than he had planned on being. The years have taught him how to be patient and how to be thorough and while he is sure Tom is lurking out there, unable to resist the temptation of the Sorcerer’s Stone and the ease such a thing would make acquiring a physical form for himself, he remains unsure if he wants to try and force a confrontation between the two.

It would be nice, of course, to finally have what he has known all long verified: that Lord Voldemort is not truly gone. That he has dabbled in terrible, profane magics to bend the lines of life and death. There is also the chance, however slim and improbable, that in such a confrontation Harry would actually manage to vanquish Tom properly. Highly unlikely but not, strictly speaking, impossible.

But on the other side of things there is always the chance that Tom could succeed in killing Harry this time or, perhaps even more worrisome, could some how subvert the boy to his own purpose.

Albus does not know why, exactly, the Sorting Hat placed Harry in Slytherin. The boy has not seemed inclined to be overly cunning or ambitious. He is not entirely unaware of his position in the world but he does not lord his fame over others or use it as currency as a true Slytherin would. The events of Halloween, while troubling, reveal that the boy has a good heart and a brave spirit hidden in there that should be encouraged and nurtured.

Which brings him back to the cloak.

He has been its steward for ten years, he tells himself, just as he has been steward for the wand for nearly fifty - since the moment he had plucked it from Gellert’s hand and used it to bind up the angry and corrupted shell of the striking blonde young man that he had fallen in love with so many summers ago. The wand, he suspects, will be his until he dies and he hopes to die without it ever passing into another’s hands. To keep others from wielding it, certainly. Others who do not have his knowledge of how quickly things go bad, of how sharply things turn into a pit from which it is so very difficult to climb out of. But he would be lying to himself if he did not acknowledge that he keeps it, in part, for Gellert. For the memory of those beautiful summer days before it all went wrong. For the reminder that ambition and want for power could render the most generous of souls into murders and madmen.

For the reminder that dark magic destroys all it touches.

Albus sighs and turns just enough to flick his wand at the cloak. Beneath the direction of his magic it folds itself neatly and then is encased in rather unremarkable wrapping paper.

No, better to give it to Harry. Despite not being what Albus wanted the boy has shown promise. It is time to give him a bit of slack and see what he does with it. To see if he can be what the world needs him to be.

And if the boy should happen across the Mirror and speak of what he sees? Well, that would prove to be particularly illuminating. Harry, while always careful to follow the rules, seems prone to wandering. Maybe the cloak will give him the push needed to do so without the pack of his friends nipping at his heels.

Before he can doubt himself again, Albus calls for a house elf and instructs the creature to make sure the package is delivered with the rest of young Harry’s gifts and then it is gone.

Albus sighs and goes back to staring out the window. There will be no sleep for him tonight. The bed is too big, too empty.

Too cold.

Leaning against the glass, he tucks his hands into the sleeves of his robe and lets his attention drift as he stares unerringly to the east.

East towards the rising sun, to hope.

East towards Nurmengard, to the lesson he can never allow himself to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do have "Albus/Gellert romantic tragedy" written on my list of fics to write someday? Yes. Yes, I do.


End file.
